Damp October?

I had a rough night.  Somewhere around midnight, I'm sure, I started fretting.  I've been considering a Dry October.  C.C. has already begun, and I have thought about supporting him.  And me.  I've been drinking too much. . . you know the study. . . aging men alone drink too much, commit more suicide, etc.  I guess there is no "etc." after suicide, though. . . . 

And so sleep was fitful then impossible.  There were many other things on my mind, too, but the idea of foregoing drink was utmost.  For years, I've done a Dry January, but that is much easier coming off the holiday revelries, and there is much support as many people are doing it.  It's like a challenge among friends.  When I was at the factory, we'd all come in and look to one another.  

"So. . . ."

Yea, it was more of a game then.  But recently, some of the gymroids have joined me in drinking mocktails that month, so there is still some support.  

But tonight I am taking my mother and her 90 year old neighbor to a community happy hour at one of the village golf course club houses, and there might be drinking.  Now this would be easy enough to forego, but there will be other outings, too, "with the gals," and they enjoy a glass of wine or a beer, and I am loathe to tell them, "Not for me."  Truly, having a tipple with friends, I think, is healthy communion.  In the past I always said I didn't trust a man who didn't drink or who did too much cocaine.  There are a proliferation of other drugs that would be included now, but you get the idea.  

It is the excessive drinking alone that troubles me.  

And so. . . I'm declaring a Damp October.  No drinking alone at home.  That's the plan.  Come on over, though, and we'll throw a couple back together.  Or let's go to dinner and have some wine.  And of course there is Octoberfest.  Good, healthy beer.  A Damp October will be o.k. and I'll still be as popular as ever.  I think this plan will reduce my monthly drinking by about 90%.  But don't worry. . . I'm not going to become a tea-totaler.  Just maybe when you aren't looking.  

It is a good decision.  The holidays are coming.  And then there is January followed by my annual physical.  I like to fool my doctor every year.  

The destruction by Helene is newsworthy, but most articles don't lay the blame for the billions of dollars of destruction at the feet of those who most deserve it.  I found one article this morning that does. It came as a tribute to a Florida writer.

In the Travis McGee novels, the protagonist, a “salvage consultant” moonlighting as a private eye, is primarily interested in a) attractive women and b) slacking. But McGee is also a rarity: an intense environmentalist with a sense of humor. (He pronounces himself “wary of all earnestness.”) He is an especially sharp critic of greedhead developers who leave shoddy buildings in their wake. He loathes condominiums. His Florida is a paradise being lost daily.

Long before scientists got on their bullhorns about population booms and breakneck development making hurricane damage disastrously worse, MacDonald was railing against shabby construction and corner-cutting in Florida’s real estate market. The admonitions in his novels carried over into his other writing. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he wrote for a small magazine in Sarasota. In one of his columns, he lamented the felling of Florida’s tall pines, if only because their shade “kept many a stalled tourist from frying like a mullet in his own grease and suntan lotion.” In another column he wrote, “Every zoning-buster, anti-planner and bay filler is degrading us for the sake of his own pocketbook.”

(link)

 As you are aware, this has been my call for a long time now.  Local governments are easy to corrupt.  The underhanded developer/politician deals are sleazy but well known.  And who pays?  Not them.  They walk away with a shitload of money.  Now we all pay for it in hard-to-get homeowner's insurance.  

I sent the article to Travis this morning.  He said he had read all of the McDonald novels.  He had tried to re-read one recently, he said, but it didn't age well.  Neither, I said, had Jimmy Buffet, Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison. . . the whole crowd.  

"But those sure were fun times.  I pity anyone who wasn't there and who didn't get their fair share."

I was reminded of Hemingway's "In Our Time."  Everybody has one.  There are just some who enjoy it more than others.  

And so I'm reminded by YouTube.  Apparently I missed a decade.  Maybe two.  Not all of them, of course, but there are things about which I have been unaware.  And catching up, I become cognizant of the influence of postmodern theory on culture--the dreadful flattening of social values.  What one is allowed to do and say has definitely narrowed.  People live in small and hostile social confines by and large, but if you are young, you don't have a comparative gauge.  Everything in the past was wrong.  I'm certain of that now.  I've been Awakened.  

But as Clint Eastwood (as John Huston) says in "White Hunter, Black Heart," "Sometimes you just have to do the wrong thing,"

Don't try that now.  You'll end up in the social hoosegow.  

But as C.C. always says, that's where creativity comes from.  Now it's all Vampires and Superheroes.  Our desires have become infantilized.  

"It's a White thing.  You wouldn't understand."

Let's get into the Not So Far Back Machine and listen to what used to. . . well. . . whatever.  She was 18 years old.  I saw her on Howard Stern when he was still insouciant.  The song had just come out.  Holy shit.  Not so long ago.  I didn't miss everything.