Herab - Down

It’s rubbish when you’re down. Of course you don’t need me to tell you that. Sat there, miserable, not quite sure why, alone, flicking through channels, then your DVD collection and your books, not seeing anything that’ll raise even the slightest flicker of a smile and becoming increasingly certain that turning to the bottle, needle then eventually noose is the only way to go. Actually, while not meaning to trivialise those last three, they’ve never especially appealed to me or featured that heavily in my envisioned career path. A bit of a drink is fine, but there’s a definite conscious (or perhaps semi-conscious) step up from a couple of beers a few nights a week to the fourteen bottles of wine some guy I saw on BBC News was getting through every day. He was incredibly proud he’d cut back to just eight or nine. One bottle for me and I’m wrecked - see Mitglied (1/1/09), two would probably put me out of action for a few days, a third and I’d be dead. Literally. Drinking alone has terrible connotations - the image I think most people get is of a middle-aged man with a bottle of Bells in a darkened room, intermittently sobbing uncontrollably, popping a ton of paracetamol and shouting garbled non-words at people who aren’t there. My drinking alone, on the other hand, consists of laughing my arse off at comedy shows and movies that become even funnier, or possibly funny for the first once you’re sufficiently inebriated. Adam Sandler movies, for example, are less likely to make me vomit from sheer comic disgust - although luckily the increased amount of alcohol in me equally offsets this, ensuring a nicely satisfying pile of sick on the floor. It sitting there overnight is essential for teaching me never to sit through Spanglish ever again. So let’s not blame booze for anything. Whatever it is, it’s clearly all Adam Sandler’s fault.

Next, turning to cheap, Afghani-sourced hard drugs is something I could never do. I’d be terrible at it. Not only am I far too polite to steal for my skag, but needles terrify me too. I could stop whinging like a little girl and smoke my heroin instead, but I’ve read chasing the dragon can lead to all sorts of other physical and neurological problems that aren’t worth bothering with if you’re down enough already. Finally, suicide is just a waste. I don’t believe bodies are sacred or you shouldn’t end your life for bullshit spiritual reasons, just that it’s such a huge world and there’s so much to experience and potentially output both creatively and charitably (besides vomit) that I really do see it as a waste, especially with young people. If that sounded wanky, sorry. Don’t care. Certainly there are exceptions. If you really gotta go, you gotta go, but personally I think I’ll always have something to write about, make jokes about and have somewhere to travel about, even if it is as a penniless, occasionally down, wandering hobo.