(Title stolen from a free 8Bit Cynics album)

“I’ve noticed you’ve been drinking a lot lately,” my mother finally got up the courage to ask. After an awkward pause she added, “Do you think you can stop?”
“I’m sure I could,” I grinned. “Any time I wanted… I’ve just never tried.” My joke was met with stony silence.
After thinking some clearly serious thoughts for some very long seconds she finally said, “Good.” Though it didn’t sound as if it was. “Because your father couldn’t.”

I’ve always been willfully ignorant about dear-old-dad. I was never one of those kids from the After-School-Specials who’d make up stories about how their deadbeats were secret agents out saving the world, and that’s why they couldn’t take them to circle-jerk practice. Never on my knees, shaking my fists at my mother, tears streaming down, whining, “I need to know who I look like!” Shit like that gives bastards like me a bad name. As far as I’ve always been concerned, I’m just a genuine, grade-A, all-American freak. And that’s the way I prefer it. But I guess some things could’ve been useful to know.

I didn’t start imbibing until I was almost twenty, a late starter in the circles I travel. Eventually though, I found myself at Mardi Gras and figured, if I had to start somewhere, swillin’ with the stew-bums and tourists was as good a place as any. And it did make the whole carnival a whole lot more fun. So, a decade later, when my mother’s warning finally came, it seemed laughably late.

The term “alcoholic” had always been thrown around nonchalantly in my group. And why not? Most grew up hearing it shouted from one parent to another. The ‘A-word’ rolls off the tongue easier, and packs a more powerful punch than ‘problem drinker.’ But in our twenties, that’s exactly what we’d meant: binge or heavy drinker. We almost never meant a person with alcoholism. Someone who is physically addicted to, or dependent on, the stuff. That was just what we joked about someday becoming, if we kept it up. Now that we’re closer to our forties than our twenties, and most of us have had alcohol-related arrests, when we use the term, we do it with an accent of weight and fear, and that’s exactly what we mean.

Sure, I’ve some friends who don’t indulge, but they’re few and far between. It’s usually because they’ve witnessed first hand what loss of control can do to lives, and are afraid if they start, it’ll happen to them. Scared of themselves. Maybe giving alcohol more respect than it deserves. Maybe not. They’ll never find out. And perhaps that’s for the bast.

The more common way my folks seem to deal with parental drunkards is closer to the other end of the spectrum. They go a little overboard. “What can I say, I’m a drunk.” they respond when confronted with stories of their poor behavior. “It runs in my family.”

Many of my friends grew up convinced because their parents were inebriates, if they themselves had a sip they wouldn’t be able to stop. Next thing they’d know, they’d wake up from a three month bender; broke, naked, and alone save the donkey they’d been doing the show with. Naturally, many of my friends became their own self-fulfilling prophets.

Personally I dislike the idea, if your parent’s a drunk, you’re a drunk. It seems an oversimplification. If someone does anything every day they’re going to become habituated to it, “genetically predisposed“ or not. What of my friend whose parent was a bartender, or the one who always ‘had to’ have martinis to close business deals, or the one who worked in a restaurant and was given free spirits every night? Habits formed, maybe even dependencies, but does that mean their children have to be alcoholics? Is the saying, “once a drunk, always a drunk” as true for them as born boozers, or can they learn to drink responsibly?

Well, fucked if I know. I’m not sure anyone truly does, no matter how much they pretend to have All the Answers.

When I was first told dipsomania ran in my family, I was outraged it came so long after I’d started drinking. But now, a decade later, I’m thankful I didn’t grow up in the dark shadow of my father’s firewater problem. A monkey on my back just waiting to become a silverback. That knowledge hasn’t done any of my friends any good. I was lucky enough to learn how to drink (to excess) properly, before finding out maybe I “shouldn’t.”

Our thoughts shape us, and I’m glad I never had to think of myself as an alcoholic-in-waiting. That being said, people aren’t static, and in fact are quite malleable. And now I do know. That’s why every so often I think it’s wise for me to take a month or so off from hitting the bottle. Just to make sure I still can. Every so often like after a long vacation with three of the best boozers I know. Every so often like now.

Taking a holiday from Knocking ‘em back is really hard at first. Half a week seems like a full. A week feels like two. By the two week mark I think I’ve got to be done by now! But eventually I begin to surprise myself by doing things I thought I only could when I was all hooched up. Starting conversations with strangers, laughing until my belly hurts, being the life of the party, feeling giddy as a child, and making seriously stupid decisions. Not as often, or reliably as when I’m taking my medicine of course (my liquid-courage) but still, it happens. Then, when I finally reach month’s end, part of me wants to continue my teetotalism. After all, crutches are useful until you don’t need them anymore, and liquor is definitely one of mine. A tool. But by then, all who’ve been patiently waiting for me to get done with my little sobriety experiment are chomping at the bit for me to tie one on and tear up the town. And ya know what, they’re abso-fuckin-lutely  right, getting wasted is a goddamned blast! Because the euphoria of drunkenness is the Universe’s apology for the drinking buddies It sends.

Rotgut is how I met most everyone I know, and how we fell in love. The last ones awake, refusing to leave the party as long as there’s booze left. Then a trip to the liquor store once it opened. Repeat.

One thing that keeps us drinking is knowing that it’s how our friends define us. I know I’ve often heard things like; “I like you much better when you’re drunk. You relax. You’re more talkative, not so aloof.” or “I have a philosophical question. I’ll have to bring it up to Drunk-Rev.” And they’re right; boozohol helps bring out sides of my personality that don’t get to see the light of day much on their own. Sides they, and me, have a hard time imagining life without. And how much time would I really want to spend disappointing everyone with my awkwardness, while I struggle to learn to dance without my crutches?

As tempting as a life without hangovers might be, I could never give up the bottle for good. My friends would like me less, and I’d like me less too. But I can give it up for now.

I think.

(Title stolen from Bad Religion’s absolutely brutal first album)

What class are you? If you’ve ever heard this question it’s probably only been once or twice, and from a young ’un who didn’t know any better. If you’re from the United States it’s because we don’t believe in such things, and if you’re from anywhere else, it’s because everyone can tell just by looking at you. In the U.S. we can still tell, but we don’t consciously think about those things. In America we basically believe there are three classes; upper, middle, and lower, and everyone thinks of themselves as middle-class. If you ask someone who grew up in a several-hundred-thousand dollar cookie-cutter home, on some cul-de-sac named after the trees that were cut down to make it, they’d say they were middle-class. If you ask someone like me who grew up in apartments that were just stuccoed together code-violations, I’d also say we were middle-class. Even after mom saved up enough money to move us beyond all that poverty – and into our very own mobile-home – in a low-rent trailer-park. I’ve now inherited and moved back into that same ol’ shack-on-wheels, so you know what that makes me? Yup, you guessed it, middle-class.

I grew up poor and rural. Sometimes in tiny rundown apartments in tiny rundown towns, and sometimes so far out in the styx that ‘town’ wasn’t even in biking distance. They were the hollowed-out places from the most depressing Springsteen songs. Those polluted river towns that died of old age when the factory shut down, or when highways opened and businesses started shipping things by truck instead of boat, or whenever-the-fuck-happened, happened. Sometimes when the leaves start to change and I begin to feel nostalgia creeping in I make the long drive back. One of the places we lived’ll probably be crushed by the next decent snow. The only thing that seems to continue to grow in those little specks on the maps of the great ol’ U. S. of A. are the cemeteries.

If you’re picturing the inhabitants of those towns as beer drinking, football lovin’, gun toting, bible thumping, red blooded, ‘mericans, for the most part, you’d be right. As you can imagine I wasn’t always the best at fitting in, and as a good, christian-fearing god, I blame my mother.

Mom was raised by a pretty well-off family; some might’ve called them upper-middle-class. When she was sixteen, and for good reasons she left home and never took a cent from them again. A few years later, she became a poor single mom. Now, the way we, in the United States, think about it, this meant that she went from upper-middle-class to lower class. But that’s not really how it works. One of those things we Americans don’t like to think about, is the difference between economic class (what you have) and social class (what you want). Economic class can change with a smeared year and a predilection for pharmaceuticals, but social class tends to take generations.

My crack about it all being ma’s fault was just my way of saying that I was raised with values different from those I grew up around. Because the person who taught me about the world was basically from a different planet from the one we inhabited.

If you’re from the U.S., there’s a good chance that it sounds crazy that your social class, something that doesn’t exist here, might somehow effect the way we are raised or fit in with others. But think for a moment about your growing up. How much of it was around (the kids of) professors, or mechanics, or drug-dealers. Think of how that informed who you are today. Things like; how you spend or invest your money. Are you more comfortable dressing up or down? Which makes you feel guilty the obscenely expensive dinner out, or the greasy burger? Do you want to work hard or hardly work? Big family or small? When is violence appropriate? Do you value a vocabulary full of big impressive words, or one that’s concise and everyone can understand? Which laws are ok to break? How rowdy should you get in public? What constitutes a compliment or insult? What’s more important, knowledge or faith? What is good art? Now try and imagine how it would’ve been growing up in the home of a doctor, plumber, or chronically unemployed person from a different strata.

From the social class we’re brought up in, we learn what should be important to us; from our hobbies to our life goals. Obviously many of us take great pride in growing past certain archaic shit we were raised with. Whether xenophobia, racism, or homophobia, thanks to exposure to things like television, music, friends, and drugs we can grow out of all that old… fertilizer. Of course, if we’d been a different class we’d have watched different shows, listened to different music, had different friends, and had different ideas about doing (certain) drugs.

No, you can’t tell what social class a person is by their bank statement. There are plenty of high-paying blue-collar jobs and low paying white-collar ones. You can though, probably tell what class a person is when their out in the pub with their friends. And much like George Bernard Shaw’s quote about patriotism, we’re all convinced that our social class is the best – because we were born into it. Those lower are dirty, roughnecks who like stupid things. Those above are wimpy, lifeless, and boring as fuck. And they’re snooty too, the way they look down on us and the things we like. I mean it’s not like we’re some meth addict piece of trash who spends all their time watchin’ WWF or NASCAR and eatin’ roadkill. Those stuck-up people are classist. We were raised right.

As I often seem to say; we’re damned dirty apes. Poo-flinging, cum-chucking monkeys who, unfortunately, are still very much pack animals. To all of our detriments an Us-against-Them mentality seems to be in our DNA. When we finally start to get it through our heads not to judge people because they were born different from us, we do it because they were brought up with different values.

I grew up without much money, surrounded by the working poor. But my mother was a hard worker, had a job for the State, and joined a good union. Over the decades the promotion and raises came. And she got to live that (21st century) American Dream of being (almost) out of debt by retirement. In the end, she made it pretty far up the corporate ladder, partially because of how she’d been raised. Though she had no money or connections from her family, she’d inadvertently inherited things like making the right amount of eye-contact, knowing when not to swear, and when to have the correct posture. What not to talk about, and when to hide her emotions and opinions. What hair, makeup, and clothes, made the right costume. And so many other things that, in short, added up to how to pass for a professional. All the things our lower-class friends didn’t know, and didn’t care to.

Mom started as a secretary. An insignificant role. But still, she was the first person people would speak to when trying to meet with her boss. They would judge him, by her. She was, in a way, a spokesperson for the whole enterprise. And if she hadn’t in her formative years learned how to pass as the class of people she was serving, she never would’ve advanced very far. Job interviews aren’t a show-n-tell of your qualifications; they’re tryouts to see if you can pass. New job skills can always be learned, but acting like an entirely different class takes a lot more work. Getting bank loans, college admission interviews, and so many other things are similar auditions. Never talking about this stuff is one of the things that insures that we’ll always have an underclass. And people will always be failing tests they don’t even know are happening.

Believe it or not, title stolen from a band!

How we talk and think about emotions is an offense to feelings. We say we’re; happy, surprised, scared, angry, sad, disgusted, or whatever, as if it’s that simple. As if we only ever feel one thing at a time. That’s the emotional equivalent of a child’s stick figure portrait. Emotions can’t be summed up neatly under just one title. And we rarely have much success defining, explaining, or predicting the little fuckers, so we usually settle for rationalizing them.

“I have experienced such diametrically opposed feelings that trying to reduce them to a simple, coherent idea would require some heavy editing of the truth” ~ Daniele Bolelli

Scientists assure us that, for the most part, we all feel the same emotions, though you’d never know it by all the different ways we try (not) to express them. When we say we’re mad it often means we’re lashing out because we’re hurt and/or feel helpless. And when we’re jealous it might actually be we’re scared and/or envious. Only in textbooks and fantasies are emotions clean and simple. Most psychologists agree that jealousy is when we’re afraid of losing something to someone else. Envy, on the other hand, is when we covet something someone else has. When the rubbers meets the road though, things aren’t so simple. When we fear someone being able to take what’s ours, it’s because of our insecurity. We’re worried that this person is better than us. Because they have qualities we envy.  In real life emotions are dirty, and complicated. And when you take into consideration cultural norms always telling us how we’re supposed to feel, even when it contradicts our nature, well, that’s when the corn-eyed brown trout hits the fan.

So, when we’re raised in a society that tells us that everything’s zero-sum, and we’re entitled to it all, and we see others having what should be ours, because we deserve it, we’re owed it – is that jealousy or envy?

Thanks to one of the most influential motherfuckers, that no-one’s ever heard of, in the second half of the 20th century advertising switched from telling us about products, to preying on our souls. Marketing began using our unconscious motivations, the very things that make us human, against us. Ads started subtly linking the schlock they were hocking with glamorous ideas of what we might become if we use them. Advertisers were no longer selling things, they were selling the lifestyles those products hinted they could bring. Straight up Madmen shit.

I like to believe that old adage about knowledge being power, so the most frustrating thing about marketing for me is that knowing we’re being influenced by the media doesn’t help much. Being conscious of how it’s trying to emotionally manipulate our fears and longings doesn’t make us immune to it. For better or worse emotions are far stronger than logic. And marketing and propaganda can hack into those survival instincts. “You want to mate, right? To be loved? You don’t want to be shunned, do you?” Advertisers’ve learned that if it grabs us by our old ape brains it can squeeze out just about any response it wants.

Until recently (when we fucked it up) there was a sound evolutionary benefit to learning by example. We saw someone close to us become a success at hunting, building a hut, or some such thing, and we learned to follow their lead and maybe succeed ourselves. Watching others fail taught us what to avoid or improve. Emotions too played (and still play) a big part in learning; joy, fear, pain… and whatever the others are, add weight and importance to those lessons, and make them stand out in our memories like a RuPaul at a Trump rally. Our survival depended on paying attention to the things that were in front of us making us scared, mad, horny, or whatever. That’s the way its been since the mold set for our brains 200,000 years ago. And that worked for a while, we didn’t even feel the need to start writing things down for 193,000 years after that. It wasn’t until about 50 ago that the media gained the knowledge that it could chain us to electronic devices and sell us clutter through them. That’s why we have the most exciting commercials for the most boring shit, and even the news tries to scare the brownies out of us to get higher ratings. If knowledge is power, I guess that other old adage is also true, about power corrupting.

Some theories are so common sense I don’t know why people bother giving them names. Cultivation Theory says, the more time we spend absorbing information from learn-by-(bad)-example media-boxes, the more we start to think real life’s like what we’ve been watching. TV cultivates  viewers’ perceptions. And it’s a great babysitter for parents who don’t want to lose their gaddamn minds, but it’s also a way a lot of kids get socialized to the tribe. A tribe that doesn’t really exist. Hell, even the average adult (American), who spends 5 hours a day sucking up the glowing waste products from their TV terminals, can’t help but be taught misinformation about the world. The more violence we watch, the more we subconsciously feel those one-in-a-zillion things might happen to us. Even though statistics show otherwise. Believing those stats might not cure our anxiety though – because emotions are stronger than logic. Likewise, the more shows we watch about the more affluent, the more we think that everyone has it better than us. And of course here too, knowing logically, that that’s not reality probably won’t change our feelings.

TV and movies are an escape from reality, fulfilling our fantasies about the way life should be. It’s its job to make everything look as good as possible. People are beautiful, thin, and in wardrobes more expensive than most cars I’ve owned. Always living in homes few in real life will ever be able to afford. The characters lives also have to be way more interesting than ours. I mean, who wants to watch a bunch of poor folks who don’t have enough time, energy, or money to have any adventures. They don’t make TV about people who sit around watching TV all the time. Logistically, part of the reason for the ever-present ginormous city-apartments and suburban-houses is to fit more characters, action, and still have room for cameras to move. And of course, even the shows that call themselves reality TV aren’t immune. HGTV and Food Network are great for showing us what we could do to make our dinners, our homes, and the smoldering ruins of our lives beautiful – if we had nothing but time, money, and energy.

Thinking that what we see on our screens is how things are supposed to be, everyone posts only the highlights of their lives to (pseudo)social media. It’s like a competition where everyone’s trying to make their lives look like commercials for perfection. Continually seeing all this  shit adds up and makes us feel poor, and poorly about ourselves. Like we’re falling behind or drowning – even when we have everything we need, and are richer than 95% of the world.

Be careful the jobs you take. It’s unavoidable that what you do 5 out of 7 days every week will effect who you are, in a lot of surprising ways. The same is true for nations as a whole. Just a couple of decades after the reinventing of advertising our country began the switch from manufacturing to a customer-service economy. We stopped making things and instead import them to sell back and forth to each other. It works, as long as we’re constantly stimulating the economy. And this is where propaganda comes in. The economic shift was marked by the 1980’s veneration of currency and its culture of conspicuous consumption. The airwaves were flooded with shows like; Silver Spoons, Dallas, Matt Houston, Richie Rich, Dynasty, Mr. Belvedere, and of course the first show that actually allowed us to look through the keyhole into the opulently wealthy, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

As only George Carlin could put it, the zeitgeist was, “whiny, narcissistic, self-indulgent people with a simple philosophy: ‘GIMME IT, IT’S MINE!’ ‘GIMME THAT, IT’S MINE!’ These people were given everything. Everything was handed to them. And they took it all: sex, drugs, and… as for the rock and roll, they sold that for television commercials a long time ago… so they could buy pasta machines and stairmasters and soybean futures… It’s in their slogans, it’s in their rhetoric: ‘No pain, no gain.’ ‘Just do it.’ ‘Life is short, play hard.’ ‘Shit happens, Deal with it.’ ‘Get a life.’ These people went from ‘do your own thing’ to ‘just say No’. They went from ‘love is all you need’ to ‘whoever winds up with the most toys wins’… And the worst of it is, the rest of us have to watch these commercials…“

And thank goodness for that, because without them to pave the way, we might never’ve had MTV’s Cribs, Real Housewives, Jersey Shore, or the Kardashians. Or any other of the talentless wealthy we get to watch live their dream-lives: getting richer and famouser by just being themselves. They stole our dream job and we despise them for it with a hate that’s primeval. Studies show that even our primate cousins get pissed when they see others getting better rewards for the same work or less.  This outraged sense of (un)fairness seems to be older than humanity itself.

As adults we still pay the electric-babysitter to keep us out of trouble, only now it’s in our pockets too, and literally never out of reach. The other realities it makes look so attractive and attainable seem like the ones that should be ours. After all, we’re entitled to the American Dream of moving up, right? Or we would’ve been if we’d been born rich, or had spent our lives making the right connections. But hey, at least we can still spend like we’re rich. And as long as we always have the excited high of that next new toy, we’ll never have to feel disappointed with our station in life, or bitter about our debt. Until our house of (credit) cards collapses. Again.

Everything’s a balancing act. The constant struggle between wanting more and being  satisfied   with what we have. Between continually improving or being  content. At different times we need both to varying degrees, but our culture only feeds one, so it grows and grows, and becomes like the wolf of darkness and despair from the old parable.