Drunk

What does a drunkard sound like? He or she might be incredibly fine in the way the words are chosen, but these same words will betray their state of inebriation: beautiful and gracious make their bows but the presence of phrases such as so clean and oh fuck no presage a descent, a ladder on which the language slides down, untidy, apocalyptic, like a town drunk tumbling down a hill, comical, Laurel & Hardy, Norman Wisdom (and then it becomes sinister when we hear the poke of the aluminium walking stick with its rubber stopper as its keeper Long-John-Silvers their way about the floor).

But on the other hand, let us hear another drunken person, the need to explain Nietzsche, the neediness of the enervated would-be intellectual, the expert on the Hungarian revolution, the rock critic yet to emerge from their shell; the rocking horse too and fro of outlandish opinion that always ends up in a cul-de-sac of the mind; another aspect of the drunkard, the splurge of words, the urge and surge of words that sometimes make sense but more often than not don’t make sense.

So what does this mean to beer, what does this mean to those who drink beer? You can get drunk, merry, smashed, wasted and wanton on beer; beer is not special, beer is not sparing of those that fill their mouths and bellies with its slow flow of sweet, bitter, luscious, sensual, bracing moments; beer like wine like gin like methylated spirits gets you drunk, is no respecter of traditions or trends, is and can be a berserker on the battlefield. 

I have been drunk, you might have been drunk, you might have thrown words about with the abandonment of a child at a kids’ party who decides that the red Smarties have to die, but to look on the bright side of life it’s a state of change, a mission impossible, a missive to the world that the order of things has been upturned, that you are drunk. And that change of things, that revolutionary nature of being, that darkness made visible can be good, a disordering of the senses as some French bloke once wrote.

And then there comes a time like tomorrow, for we are talking about tomorrow, the drunk will be changed, reversed into sobriety, uninterested in Nietzsche, tumbledown Dick no longer, clean and sober and as happy as the eternal Larry.

Until next time.