Man and His Booze

Men and alcohol is a match made in heaven. I think that wedding vows would apply more effectively and consistently to men and booze. I find the fit and harmony pleasantly remarkable.

Take a look at an edited sample of a traditional wedding vow:

Will you love (booze), comfort (booze), honor and keep (booze), in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, in sadness and in joy, to cherish and continually bestow upon (booze) your heart’s deepest devotion, forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto (booze) as long as you both shall live?

What are two has now become one. What was put together let no one put asunder.

Looking at it, it’s the perfect marriage. When you examine the precepts mentioned in the matrimonial vow, Men and Booze make a happy couple.

Love booze? Of course it’s a given if you’re a man. You might not like it at first, but as you continue to drink, it grows on you. Suddenly without rhyme or reason, without you noticing, you now have an affectionate regard towards alcohol. You then reach the point where you can’t live without it. If that is not love, then what is?

And we do honor alcohol. Do we not we use it during mass? Do we not we make toasts with it? Do we not we keep vintage wines and exquisite whiskeys in high esteem? Do we not spend a considerable sum of time and money when it comes to booze?

In sadness and joy there is booze. Have a reason to celebrate? We drink. Got dumped? We drink. Depressed? We drink. Won the lotto? We drink. In calamities and triumphs, booze is always at our side.

When it comes to devotion, men couldn’t be more devoted to booze. Booze is man’s best friend. Booze makes a man open up his heart and it will listen to men without fatigue or judgment. Now that’s a big thing. Also, booze is forgiving and comforting. It gives men a brief but much needed release from the harshness of life. When you had a bad day, you go: “I think I need a drink.”You don’t say: “I think I need to see my girl”, or “I think I need to go to church.” Also consider that in wine there is truth. Booze brings out the hidden depths or shallowness of a man. Men find things about themselves thanks to alcohol. Because of booze, men discover the hero and the devil within. The great guy and the jerk lurking in his heart. And booze is also a ready teacher of lessons in moderation. You drink too much, you get a hangover. You drink too much, you throw up. Booze teaches you all this. And even if we don’t learn our lesson, booze patiently makes us throw up and have hangovers until we know better. For all of this, men are devoted to his drink.

And men forsake everything when they drink. When drinking, all men think of is to drink some more. You know how some wives have to drag their husbands from the table, or how fights start when the woman calls for the man in the presence of his buddies. It’s simply hard to separate man from his drink.

Speaking of separation, only death can separate man and his drink. People stop boozing because they die. You have drunk driving, drunken arguments resulting to murder, and liver deterioration and hypertension. So the only way men stop drinking is when they are dead, or in the process of being killed by booze. And men cling to their drink. This is because when men stop drinking, it’s like dying in a way. Life is not fun anymore. It lost its original color of splendor. You lost contentment in your placement in the world. You lost something important that allows you to stomach the interesting things in this life. Man and Booze, till death do them apart.

It’s a very comic fit. It’s funny how sometimes men love their booze more than their women. If men could only have sexual relations with booze and have children with booze, women would be rendered obsolete. (Of course this is a harsh or sexist thing to say, but take it in the spirit of comedy. Meaning, none of this is serious, unless you take it to be.)

And women always hate it when their men take to booze. It’s paranoid jealousy (it’s redundant, I know). If I was a woman, I would certainly find it disturbing that my man spends more time, laughs more and even opens his heart more to booze. Then think about how hard you had to work your womanly charms just for your man to buy you something, and compare it to how cash flows like a ruptured dam when it comes to booze. It can be frightening; it would be devastating for a woman to find out her real status in her man’s value hierarchy. That between her and booze, booze has the upper hand.

This is why booze is an enemy of women (add to this the fact that most unplanned pregnancies are not due to Cupid’s amorous influence, but due to Bacchus’ intoxicating power). It takes away their man’s time, money and attention. And when a man comes home drunk, there is no hope for some late night action.

Maybe this is the reason why women take to booze themselves. If you can’t beat them, join them. Maybe if women can also have children and sex with booze, then we won’t need each other. All we need is just a good old bottle of beer to comfort and keep us company as we travel through life drinking ourselves to contentment and death.

About Letting Go

Letting go is growing up. This is something I’ve seen in Snow Falling on Cedars. Letting go of something that you hold dear. Of something that has been the defining object of your existence. You try to move forward but always hiding the pain. Trying to put up a brave face even though one is really broken and dying inside. The funny thing is that you are equivocal about the idea of salvation. To be spared of the pain is to be able to forget at the same time. That the old significance will be washed away by new events and a new happiness. You fear that learning to let go is disrespecting the memory, of burning all that you have accomplished. To go through life fresh, but with this freshness is the cost of nakedness, of being alone and vulnerable. Starting all over means having to climb up the mountain once again and risk the pain of tumbling down once more in a broken heap. Sometimes one gets to think that the human heart also has its limits. One feels one cannot go through the same thing again. And so one lives in fear, in anxious self-preservation. Living the life of a prey that can be devoured anytime. This is how comical the human heart is. Or human emotions in general. But emotions are part of what makes us human. It’s an integral part of our being. Our capacities for reason also assume our capability to make the worst choices in our lives.

When you can’t let go, you are filled with fear.

Back to the hesitation for getting salvation. We want to be saved, but we don’t want to. We don’t want the pain, but we want to always remember. But to remember is to get hurt. So that is the irony of the situation. Want to be relieved of the pain, but it is the pain itself that is the one thing you don’t want to let go. I can’t move on, because of the pain. Because of something important that will be lost. Somehow you feel it base to compare what is lost with what is going to be gained. You feel that this is something that is not a business transaction. It is not in the world of laws, reason and weighing of advantages. It is the world of feeling. The world of the soul. There should be a demarcation and you obstinately hold your ground. You can’t let up. You will not let up. You rebel and not accept exhortation of reality. You hold on stubbornly. You hold it with clenched fists placed against your heart. You dare not let go. You dare not let go.

The image of not letting go. You can’t let go of something that was lost. Of something that can never be recovered. You end up being like Gatsby, trying to bring back the time although he knows at the back of his mind that it’s not possible. He denies this fact even unto himself. He denies it so strongly that he deluded himself with the idea of Daisy and the green light. He was living with ghosts of his own creation. He was human right to the end. And he was innocent and pure. His means are questionable but I still believe he is one of the best chaps around. He was never bad out of malice. And his dreams are innocent dreams. But he was tragic in the sense that he was too pure, meaning stupid, to accept the facts that was presented to him. He also did not have the flexibility to change his life to pursue a different path. A different happiness. But how many of us can really do just that? And if somebody did, we admire them, but also think that something is wrong with them. That these people committed an injustice. A sin that is not easily pardonable. They learned how to forget. They learned to move on. And somehow, we find that unbelievable. We find it abhorrent. We detest the pain but we need it. We cry and gloat over our suffering at the same time. We live in an eternal contradiction. We can’t really let go. We dare not let go.

There should be a proper mindset to all of these. And what is the goal really? That it’s okay to let go? Or just to say why it’s hard to let go? Perhaps I’ll take the second option. To say and show why it’s difficult to let go. There are times when you just really can’t. Even when the wound is no longer fresh, even if the scar is only a blemish of what it once was, all you need is to remember. All you need is to have the right mindset and the right emotions. The right focus. The right soul for it. When seen during happy times, the pain of remembering might be weak, but with the right state of the soul, the tears and deluge of feeling will come back instantly. When you think about it in its purity, in its essence, you’re bound to feel like the wound was just received today.

As much as we hate noise, we need it for distraction. We need noise to silence the throbbing of pain and the screams of agony of the heart. We hate to be left alone, in front of the mirror. We need to be busy since we don’t want to be constantly reminded. If we’re constantly reminded, we’re going to die. We won’t be able to function. I have a soft spot in my heart for drunks and drug addicts because of this. You can have compassion, but forgiveness can be a different matter. We need something on our hands that will let our minds wander somewhere else. We need something that can point our attention to something else besides ourselves.