Day 1: A second shot of Succulence, Balzac Beer belly and the Vagina frozen at the chronicled inception of time…

After 38.5 days of skidding around aimlessly in the (arid pomo-prohibitionesque) desert of voluntarily induced sobriety with a keyboard in lieu of a bar room coaster, I can’t tell you how good the first beer felt that spring day, ferrying a cube of Sam Adam’s home from Western Liquors, wielding the glass bottle in the fashion of undressing an amber revolver from a leather holster in a weak-western black and white sunset ‘this town ain’t big enough for the two of us’ showdown, allowing the malty contents to shot-gun into my anatomy in one elongated slurp, padding my chest as if in applause afterwards, an almost post-coital feeling of accomplishment mingled with failure. The proverbial caricatured demon and cherub espousing verities of morality perched on the peak of dueling shoulder blades passed out as if they had just performed a Kierkegaardian keg stand on the front frat house lawn of my collective consciousness.

I felt back.

Life felt good.

I cracked open another beer.

The evening next I took my mom out to dinner and to play a Cornstock, lost in the lavender drape of coppery tint, the errant splash of June light leftover to linger across the hazy scalp of the park like a banner at dusk. I arrived late to my post-sobriety-relapse gala at the Tartan Inn truant, meeting a few writer friends of mine, intending to drink my ass off, unaware at the time that a few scattered tables to my left, seated in a rhombus of fruity drinks and high-pitched banter was a woman, a sexy Red Haired Irish lass who hadn’t ventured into a bar in 17 years who had read had been a fan of Succulent Sobriety. She seemed to know more about the project than the author. We drank into 2am eye-lid oblivion and shut the Tartan down and adjourned to my apartment, the after bar erupting in a decadent chorus of beer-fused laughter, my female poet friend flashing her body at on-coming traffic from the wooden lip of my balcony, finding myself, later that night, straddling the limbs of the red-haired Irish lass from behind as if trying to buckle are torso's together in rhytmic time-signature and classical pantings, as if trying to fuck mount Vesuvius, limbs flaccid in a Pompeii of post-coital exhaustion as the breath of the morning sun trickled into the linoleum cloud of my kitchen as if in a dream.

Life was good.

I received very kind letters from people whom I had never met who read Succulent Sobriety and were touched (which if you are a writer is equivalent of a Pulitzer pulse). I went on long tortuous drives lost in the intermittent fumble of back roads in the country with the Sexy Red haired Irish Lass chasing the tendrils of summer light into the dry eraser board of the west, passing the crimson slouch of an orphaned barn, feasting off cigarettes and beer and breakfast pizza from Casey's (fucking best breakfast pizza on the slice of this planet) from rural backwash towns with a population far less than the high school I graduated from, always driving, always smoking and gesticulating, watching as the exclamatory emerald wincingly leaked from the poetic pigment each individual stalk of harvested pending corn, a photosynthetic swan song ushering in the nocturnal dip in temperatures, the leafy shuffling of the seasons, christening the meted blinks chiseling out our conception of what is perceived as time, finding ourselves driving, finding ourselves eight hours away from the imprisoning cradle if our area code, bucolically bivouacking, scuttled around the ember nest of a fire, brewing a kettle of coffee, lost beneath the cosmic slumber triumphant in the overhead stars.

Life was good. I still wrote my ass every day. I completed the 2.5 days left in Succulent Sobriety six disparate entries over a three-month gestating time period ( my favorite being this one).

I delved into the habit sitting down for 18 hours and pounding beer after beer at the oak lip of my writing desk. Poet Kyle Devalk and I instituted ‘Wasted Wednesdays', where we would drink while talking about art, lighting incense, listening to snapping recordings' of beat literature until the floor rose up and smacked us on the dome of our respective frontal lobes. I received more letters from people who enjoyed Succulent Sobriety. I received missives from people who fucking hated it. A radio raconteur in town told me I was pedantic and that I was trying to inexplicably rip off Jack Kerouac. I received a chest-cavity wrenching letter from my sister in town stating that I was an alcoholic and needed help. I received a letter from my cool artistc sister on the East coast stating that I wasn’t the only one with problems. I received just a completely unfounded solipsistic self-indulged letter from a former friend whose back I have had over the years who accused me of disgusting, degrading shit while exiling me from a poetry series I loved while feeling the need to institute addional rumors of untoward disdain to supersede his own (blatant) paucity of poetic talent (No, I'm not a pedophile. No, I never raped anyone or molested any of my sisters' friends at a sleepover when I was in my teens. I'll gladly submit and pay for any polygraph since it will be routinely cheaper than the defamation lawsuit I will be coerced into filing if this rumor shit continues to gyrate on the mill of your own delusions of aesthetic grandeur). While not issuing a verbal edict my mom seasonal banished me from her house as well, dumping out the beer I had stowed in her garage I was saving for the completion of my novel commiserating with my sisters that I indeed had issues with the predilection to routinely drain as many sudsy draughts as is humanly possible. The house I had crashed at twice a week during the bulk of Succulent Sobriety, the woods I had plowed with crisp swipes of an axe, the desk I hewed in the woods over looking the creek planning on writing at all summer, again were all vehemently verboten.

The sight of my limbs ferrying a 12 pack of sam adams season sampler slug over my shoulder like a serf lugging an integral cube en route for the contruction a great pyramid never built became ubiquitous in the avenues of West Peoria.

I continued to drive around chasing the whispering drips of bleeding Midwestern Sunsets with the Red Haired Irish lass, often crashing at her palace in Marquette Heights, writing amidst the arboretum of botanical columns in her back yard. My teal (rococo flavored, looks like something enya would scribe sonnets on) writing desk often wreathed by a crunched corral of vacant beer cans. One crisp autumnal afternoon we take off to Missouri just to buy cigarettes (ie, thirty bucks per carton vs. that of sixty here in Illinois) driving south into the pastoral hymn of barbed wire and county lines, . farmland in central Illinois resembles a contiguous front lawn dotted with tautly strapped bolls of hay and alfalfa arrayed like a random assortment of clenched fists sprouting in protest fashion in front of the occasional dilapidated silo. We continue to drive losing ourselves into the blurred ribbons of passing cement as the earth continues to toss into the elliptical rumble of another season combine devouring the scalp of the plant in synchronized chomps and multiple thousand ton farm equipment rove the fields gnawing at the agriculture like highly-trained tusked Paleolithic mammals. Six hours later we find ourselves skidding across the dancing hills in western Missouri, crossing (tersely) into Kansas, taking a hard north, sprinting through the dun chessboard plains of Nebraska, crashing at a rest stop just inside Iowa, before waking up and plowing north once again, into golden sheets of South Dakota, the commodious a-cup quilt that is the Great Plains sprawling like a coppery quilt buffed in all directions, finding ourselves clambering amongst the geo-granite Armageddon-enhanced overturned ashtray buttes of the badlands, crossing over into Mountain time, finding ourselves floating into elevated mist of the Black Hills, passing the bad-perm bifurcated swirl of mountain rams head butting on the side of the road, passing the shaggy goatees of itinerant mountain goats, feeling a sense of almost jingoistic (although never overtly admitted) awed by the craggy visages hatching out from the granite jowls of Mt. Rushmore, setting up camp a few miles down the road, lost in the orchestral drizzle of the piercing overhead constellations.

We wake up the next day and watch the sky give birth to the sun over Mount Rushmore. I take my companion's cell phone and dial in sick to work for the first time ever in five years, fabricating an illness, lying in front of a sculpted police line of former presidents.

We traipse back from South Dakota, breezing across the lower lip of Minnesota, kicking into the corner pocket of Wisconsin (loading up on indigenous cheese and Podunk watered down Lacrosse Lager because you can’t find excessively watered-down Lacrosse lager in Illinois), always lost, always finding a back road blotted with barns, tracing the river road underbelly of the Mississippi river, arriving home, the bleeding Illinois sun setting as if the sun ricocheting off the refulgent brow of a monarchial diadem a medieval coronation ceremony.

A resplendent halo punctuating the beauty, the key-signature of our spontaneous sojourn.

The anthemic wings smattering amplified applause of forbidden angels

When I arrive home from our mecca that night every light in my apartment is flicked on illuminated calendar squares. I tell my sexy Irish red-headed companion to stay in the car. I espy the silhouette of what looks like a human joystick flouncing around in nylon stretches from room to room. I walk up the back steps. I see that the back door has been kicked in. For a tenth of eternity I wonder if I am being robbed. As I walk up the back steps I hear music blaring. I then hear the voice of my poetic comrade Kyle Devalk creeping towards me, beer in paw, telling me his girlfriend kept him out, informing me that he has been crashing on my back porch for the past two days

Life is good.

With Kyle back Wasted Wednesdays b/come wasted weekdays and I-don’t-know-what-the-fuck-just-transpired what-is Ron-Jeremy-doing-in-my-apartment-holding-a-Thesaurus-in-the-conch-of-his-vacant palm wasted-weekends. The thirty pounds I notably tithed during Succulent Sobriety came back with second-trimester gut pouting vigor. An encore ten pounds tumesced duly like feeding a pesky mid-eighties cinematic mogwai after midnight. I accumulated the gall to place all 1100 single space-pages of my 13 year old novel (ie, life's work) on line, a chapter (or formative fractal) a day for 290 days straight. Our good brew chugging neighborhood brothers at the Tartan Inn invited us to host our monthly poetry readings at their hip craft-beer catering establishment. I'll never forget the incendiary literary energy accompanying the second reading where the audience was spilling out of the bar and I harbored the poetic privilege of introducing 17 diverse drooling poets and writers who performed their work with thunderous dynamics of joy .

It made me feel, simply, like I was choreographing the fucking Oscars.

I continued to write. I continued to drink. I had the world's coolest roommate. The domestic tiffs with my family gradually scabbed over and healed. I become an Uncle for the first time (you can be damn sure my nephew received nothing but pint sized WHITE SOX apparel from his Uncle David over the holidays). The scarlet-haired Irish lass turned out to be a fucking-amazing hometown cracker-barrel farm fresh eggs and country biscuits gravy chef who can do shit with a spatula and a rack of spices that Harry Potter can’t do with a wand.

Due to the nature of my beer swinging word-pummeling yet sedentary lifestyle I transitioned into Balzac with a beer belly. My grandfather whom I hadn't seen in seven years inquired how I loaded up all that excess weight over the holidays. For the first time ever I comfortably zipped up into a pair of jeans whose waistline was higher than the digits of my current age. I didn't care as long as I was plowing into the page. As long as the tattered tips of my fingers continued to stampede up and down like an agitated piston for eight hours a day. As long I was cloaked in a plume of smoke, as long as I was knocking back bottles of beer in a very Big Lebowski 'shut the fuck up Donnie' pin splattering inflection, as long as the coffee pot was purring the next room over, as long as I was chain smoking and drinking and writing and fucking and laughing and giving and going on long country escapades with the sexy red headed lass and camping and eating just orgasm-inducing entrees and drinking still more beer.

As long as life was perfect.

One autumnal night driving home after our poetry readings I spot a herd of five deer grazing in the arable lea between the dollar general and the police station in Marquette Heights, and fueled by the intensity of the reading and sans giving a second thought, I prop open the passenger wing of the vehicle I was riding in, toss my poetry notebook and copy of Leaves of Grass in the air like a mortarboard after commencement ceremony. Crossing my arms near the white of my torso as I peel off my shirt, kick out of the denim fins of my jeans and run naked in the company of deer (they didn't run, we all stood together, the voice my red haired companion lambasting me, telling me that there is open alcohol in the vehicle, informing me that this is Marquette Heights and there are cops fucking everywhere and that the police station is intrinsically like right next door) the writer, naked, long hair leaking into his chest, deer all around him, lost in the trumpeting nocturnal jism of autumnal stars.

If life is so good, why revisit Succulent Sobriety. Why indulge in another 1000 hours of abstaining from bottled- barley beechwood aged slightly malted heavenly-hopped slurps of alcoholic joy.

The answer dates back sometime in the mid-nineties. I was clanged around the smoky curved corners of the side table in what was once Lums family restaurant on Western Avenue, drinking infinite carafes of 99 cent coffee, smoking cigarettes with my cadre of bohemian brothers. I had a friend who was quite a few years older named Timm Gillick. Timm was a girth raconteur with a drizzling beard who often went by the nickname of 'The Jester' but he was also writer of horror-screenplays and daintily doodled really cool caricatures.. Due to his Michael Moore meets Dungeons & Dragons demeanor there was something suggestive of Timm that seemed like he would feel perfectly content if sequestered in the paragraphs an Alexander Dumas novel and sentenced to wear a Viking helmet 24-7 for the rest of his known life. Timm was relaying an anecdote about how, during his freshman year at college, his philosophy professor presented the class with a one word one question final.

The singular-syllable interrogative homonymic 25th letter of the alphabet and sometimes vowel being that of ‘why?’

Why.

Timm continued to gesticulate, relaying the story, stating that, out of a classroom full of 30 students’ there was only three who provided a valid response to such an epistemological ripple. The responses were, in tandem, ‘Why not?’, ‘Why ask Why?’ and my favorite, which was purportedly Timm’s own answer, a simply stated, “Because.”

Because.

And this is why I am reprising the linguistic bluff that is Succulent Sobriety once again, capitulating to the pulse of entertaining certain things I love.

Simply Because.

Because I tried going for forty days without a beer last spring and feel 36 hours short of my goal.

Because I want to understand this beaker of nerves and pigment that is the vessel of my flesh.

Because I want to b/come a better natural writer. Because I am (literally, no shit here) astounded by high school students taking the written section of the SAT and how naturally they are capable of scratching ink into the pasture of the page, as if with a Debussy flaccidity graced into the docile arc of wrists (how can you POSSIBLY scribe even the syllables of a shopping list without chain-smoking? Without popping up every five minutes and loafing around the room and losing yer focus in the pensive reflection of your visage in your laptop

Because, as my co-workers will attest to, I drink more coffee than anyone you have ever seen in your entire life ( I used to burn out coffee pots in high-school and this is PS (pre-Starbucks) era.)

Because on a neurological caliber I am just innately curious about what endorphins are released in my brain every time I have a beer, water sifting through the fissures of a friable dam in drips of creativity before flooding the plugged dactyl of the Dutch girl underneath in a geyser of verbal bliss.

Because I still have bitterness in my life and (boy) it still fucking hurts at times when I randomly skid across a picture if the love of my life via facebook dandling the child we never had.

Because I want things to slow down, the accelerated subway blur of reality crackling in viral snaps of cryptic acronyms and glyph lexicons of sputtering attention-span deafening texts.

I’m doing this because I want to look at the world in a new way. Because my hunger for growth and personal development in every facet of my being is greater than my carnivorous predilection to gnaw into a raw slab of meat. Because my thirst to fine-tune whatever literary talents I have harvested is greater than my thirst to chug as many beers as if humanly possible in a 10 hour writing session. Because I want the nest of ashes my flesh deposits after I exit this planet is greater than the expired tapered out dregs of previously ingested tobacco over flooding whatever mock-receptacle ashtray I could find. Because the meat I salivate and hunger over on the plate of the page is greater than any last meal (even one served by the sexy red haired lass). Because (as my mentor, the late David Foster Wallace once posited in one gargantuan fuck of a novel), “Sometimes human being just need to stay in one place and, like, hurt.”

Because, as Whitman said, "There is that which is in me. I know not what it is. But I know it is in me."

Because I do want to take shirtless author photos with long my long tresses before I get scalped this spring in the name of literature.

Because if you don’t constantly push yourself to view the glorious trajectory of this planet we find ourselves momentarily ensconced in this bubble of consciousness together in a different perspective you are, formidably speaking, fucked as a writer.

This is why I am embarking from the drunken port once again, wading into the inscrutable surf of what is unknown.

Simply Because.

Because as long as we are here we are immortal

Because, in the end, we're still not here very long at all.
Why?

Simply because.
                                                                   ***

 

 

So this is where I am and this is the itinerary. Over the next 40 days I'll do nothing but write my ass off in a vision quest to discern certain truths about my body, this corporela husk of enervated epidermis I metaphsycally find myself second-mortgaged within for a very short period of time. In the inaugral Succulent Sobriety I was airing out my liver like fresh spring linen, flapping a half-decade’s worth of cyclical debauchery on the narrative clotheslineof the page in hopes that this author might be readily able to discern just why he feels the need to feel blitzed all the time. The first Succulent Sobriety was composed under a wisping cape of tobacco and winking eye of the coffee pot. This time I'm sloughing everything that might even fall in the time-zone of a vice to see what is left inside of me. I'm also giving up meat and endeavoring to adhere to a vegan lifestyle. Nothing pinched and ejaculated from the udder of a hormone mammalian nipple and processed and duly curdled will enter my anatomy The first week will indubitably be raw, like a trying to coordinate an offensive line for the superbowl sans both a quaterback and a ball.

The first week (Jan 14-21st) I'll do nothing but juice, which should be intriguing since my alcehmcial mixture of cucumbers, green apples and carrots resembles something the Incredible Hulk would donate at a Stan Lee oriented sperm center.

More than anything else I want the nagging little sister to the original Succulent Sobriety to be a philosophical discourse and intellectual inquiry into the sociological ramifications about why human beings allow shit to govern them.There will be ameneities in which I'll delineate (pretty much) my disdain about vegetarian I know ( 90 of the world doesn't even have clean water or toilet paper and heree you are being all organic and picky).

Overall I'll be honest. Over the past two months I've slovely slipped in the habit of knocking back 8-12 (plus ) beers in a 24 hour encapsulated prism of time. I'll be honest about the withdrawal.I'll be honest about what it feels like to be tabacco free. I'll write about my twin dedade propensity to (more or less incessantly) almost always have a cup of coffee, and how I love the percolated flush of griany liquid circulating like christmas lights in my veins at all times.I'll write about being hardcore addictions. About lulling myself to states of bliss and relaxation via a good ol' dose of daily bare-skinned cyber bliss, or how, over fuck, the last 12 years the only time I could really cum was after ingesting just insane amount or porn, which, will probably make the assiduous reader either really horny or really uncomfortable or both. Mammals lusting to tersely be inside of fellow mammals. Mammals gnawing fibers and skin of different sub genomes for nourishment. Mammals ingesting vices into the nylon sac of arteries an veins.
 
I'll more than likely resemble a diminutive Mario pining for a one-up mushroom in a fairy tale kingdom never to be found.. I may seem tepid and weak. I have no clue how nullifying my vices will effect my writing.The naked hydrant-sized moppet fleeing the hovering eclipse of a tuft of broccoli at the banner of this page.

Vegan til exactly a week past Valentine's day.


                                                                  ***

The last thing I want to tell you is about my Creative Vagina. My vagina is one of the most bucolic serene gulps of topography you will ever witness. My creative vagina is always wet. Sometimes its so wet it comes up to my knees. If Lord or the Rings were to be composed with autumnal scraps of leaves in lieu of sentences the interior of the novel would look just like Matthiessen state park. The park is located in LaSalle County and is Starved Rock's less touristy more precocious Siamese twin. Along with the Art Institute of Chicago, the former Comiskey park and the Baha'i House of worship in Chicago the park is my sanctuary,  my favorite place in Illinois.

Next to literature the park has been my best friend.

Every time I exit the park I am reborn. I had been there twice with church groups in the early 90's and canoed with my father and Gary Heinz in the Vermillion but it was November 1997 when I found myself driving alone, unaware of where I would go, and ended up ambling inside the welcoming botanical cove that is Mattheissen somehow realizing that I needed to drop out of college and carve out sentences into the ashen ache of the page. Every time I leave the nesty foliage of the park a part of me is reborn. I've found myself there days before randomly getting a new job, a relationship, before commencing a new literary project, before finding a dear a friend who was somehow there all along. I've been stoned and seen gnomes. I've gotten naked and skinny dipped in the muddy ribbons of the Vermillion. I've danced beneath waterfalls. I've cried. I had someone I didn't really know randomly give me the keys to her car and I found myself tramping around the park and when I arrived home was informed that my father was on his deathbed.


Happens every time I leave the ovum of the park. It is my Mecca. My Bethleham. My Beneras. My sacred place.

My creative vagina.




 Last week a few days after the incipience of a new year I found myself ambling around the park with a dear friend. It was cold and the waterfalls were frozen--the park caped with a fresh layer of untrammeled snow so that it looked like a wedding cake absconded from the arctic swills of a domestic deep freeze. It was icy and precarious and looked like a continent of glass but when I came to the bottom of cascade falls at the lower dells I knew I had to scale it. I knew I had to climb inside and, if metaphorically, be reborn.

I clambered up the bottom of the waterfall, a frozen bouquet of winteresque ivory, translucent stubble, impenetrable ridges--It felt like I was mounting the trunk of a Sequoia. I found an aperture behind the intractable layers of ice, maybe three feet high, maybe smaller, I crouched into fetal posture and, thinking of the vegan no-beer sojourn was ready to embark on in the pending days, pushed my way through, slipping, falling down, getting up, my breath arched in front of me crisp bulbs, thinking of Tennyson, and how though we are not that strength which is old days moved time and heaven, that which we are we are. One equal temper of heroic hearts. Perhaps made weak by time and fate but strong by will.

Willing to strive. Yearning to Seek. Burn to find.

 

Eternally refusing to yield.

 

Here's to another 40 days.

 

Thanx for keeping me company along the way.