We'll drink to that

Prohibition was repealed on this date in 1933.

"Alcohol is the anaesthesia by which we endure the operation of life." -- George Bernard Shaw.

Most of his life’s activity, it occurred to Sully, had consisted in just about equal parts of sports, reading and drinking. The rest had been sheer boredom. All of it had been boredom, to one degree or another, for that matter. Life was short only in retrospect; when it was happening it could take forever. -- The Misforgotten, Chapter 22.

Here's looking at you, later

Alcoholics Anonymous was founded on this day in 1910.

"I drink to make other people interesting." -- George Jean Nathan.

   Most of his life’s activity, it occurred to Sully, had consisted in just about equal parts of sports, reading and drinking. The rest had been sheer boredom. All of it had been boredom, to one degree or another, for that matter. Life was short only in retrospect; when it was happening it could take forever.

                                                                       -- Chapter 22, The Misforgotten

Here's looking at you, if I have to

Alcoholics Anonymous was founded on this day in 1910.


"I drink to make other people interesting." -- George Jean Nathan.

   Still, alcohol had played its part in some of the happiest times of his life. At least so it seemed to him. How often had he warmed himself by the fire of fellow feeling, reveled in the commingling of like minds, kindred hearts! At a particular pitch of drunkenness, all men were brothers, and the self slipped away, receded temporarily. The only immortality Sully believed in was just this, the persistence of good will, the community of souls that would outlast heaven and earth, that would live on as a rebuke to the implacable enmity of the cosmos.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten.

Or even every once in a while

British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was born on this day in 1804. He said:


"It destroys one's nerves to be amiable to the same human being every day."

 For a while there, for about ten years, Tolleson had been one of Sully’s best friends, maybe his best friend, for a couple of years at least. They’d played rugby together and Tolleson had lived with him for a while after his fourth arrest for DUI, sleeping in the bathtub in Sully’s tiny apartment about the time when Sully was seeing Rae Ann. They’d taken his driver’s license away and Sully had had to drive him everywhere. He was just about broke, having lost his job because of the DUIs and spent all of what he’d saved up on a lawyer to keep his ass out of jail. He didn’t have anything to do so he rode around with Sully on his route. Sully had a job setting up cigarette displays in stores, and while he shouldn’t have been riding Tolleson around, he felt sorry for him. At the very first stop every morning Tolleson would buy a couple of six-packs, and by the end of the day he’d have a sizeable buzz-on, before Sully had even started drinking.  --  Chapter 5, The Misforgotten.

What a character!

Sportswriter Heywood Hale Broun was born on this day in 1918. His famous remark is "Sports do not build character. They reveal it."


"I hate all sports as rabidly as a man who loves sports hates common sense." -- H. L. Mencken.

   Most of his life’s activity, it occurred to Sully, had consisted in just about equal parts of sports, reading and drinking. The rest had been sheer boredom. All of it had been boredom, to one degree or another, for that matter. Life was short only in retrospect; when it was happening it could take forever.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten.

Ah, sweet metronome of life!

Birthday of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, born 1892. She wrote:


"It is not true that life is one damn thing after another--it is one damn thing over and over."

One thing he knew, he’d had a genuine taste for the stuff. It hadn’t always been like that; he’d had to develop it. He loved to drink. Life was, he’d seen early on, a monotony. Drinking made things interesting, at least. Therein lay his desire for it, he supposed.  --  Chapter 36, The Misforgotten.

We'll drink to that

Prohibition was repealed on this date in 1933.


"Alcohol is the anaesthesia by which we endure the operation of life." -- George Bernard Shaw.

Most of his life’s activity, it occurred to Sully, had consisted in just about equal parts of sports, reading and drinking. The rest had been sheer boredom. All of it had been boredom, to one degree or another, for that matter. Life was short only in retrospect; when it was happening it could take forever...

Alcohol was a great sage and a great liar. Its way was toward life, and toward death. That is, it revealed life for what it was, a dream, and hastened one toward death, that dreamless sleep. The dream of life would give way to death, and death in turn, as a nullity abhorred by nature, would give way to new life, not a botched one this time but a fully realized one at last.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten.

What's a best friend for?

American author Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary) was born on this day in 1842.

"Bierce would bury his best friend with a sigh of relief, and express satisfaction that he was done with him." -- Jack London.

They got on a Jack London spree and over the course of a month or two read just about everything London ever wrote. Cutterback brought a copy of John Barleycorn to the pool on Saturday afternoon and read Sully some passages he’d marked.
“’This is the hour of John Barleycorn's subtlest power…this is the hour of the white logic, when he knows that he may know only the laws of things--the meaning of things never….All this is soul-sickness, life-sickness. It is the penalty the imaginative man must pay for his friendship with John Barleycorn...He looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions…Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke. From his calm-mad heights, with the certitude of a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends--in the clear, white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is their frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms, like all the other little humans…’
“Hee hee hee. I love that. Miserable little egotisms. At least my egotism’s big, right, pal?”
“Monumental,” Sully said.
“’They are without freedom. They are puppets of chance. So is he. He realizes that. But there is one difference. He sees; he knows. And he knows his one freedom: he may anticipate the day of his death. All of which is not good for a man who is made to live and love and be loved. Yet suicide, quick or slow, a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through the years, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his ever escapes making the just, due payment.’
“He was thirty-seven when he wrote that. He made his due payment three years later.” Cutterback took a drink and grinned, but his lips were quivering, Sully saw, and he seemed about to tear up.
“Well, he got his wish,” Sully said. “He said he’d rather be ashes than dust.” -- Chapter 32, The Misforgotten.

I drink, therefore I am

On this day in 1910, Alcoholics Anonymous was founded.

"I drink to make other people interesting." -- George Jean Nathan.

One thing he knew, he’d had a genuine taste for the stuff. It hadn’t always been like that; he’d had to develop it. He loved to drink. Life was, he’d seen early on, a monotony. Drinking made things interesting, at least. Therein lay his desire for it, he supposed. -- Chapter 31, The Misforgotten.

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The Misforgotten