I am personally not one to get good and royally drunk. As must be clear at least to long-time readers, I'm a guy of strict discipline and resolve. So going overboard on anything -- except maybe doing good -- simply doesn't happen. And I would never encourage anyone else to get inebriated, wasted, or faced. If they came to me and asked, "Should I?" I'd say "No."
Then we have a guy like Stanley "Tipsy" White, staff reporter for my newsletter (soon to be published). He didn't ask, he just showed up with drunk as his default. Drinking's simply his thing, his basic modus operandi in life, the way he copes, gets along, and lives. Yes, of course, when he's at the work release farm (he's a prisoner) he probably doesn't have perfect access to the hard stuff. But he's obviously getting it somehow; when he showed up at my place he was already drunk, and he's been working on something ever since.
I like watching Tipsy, maybe because we're such polar opposites. A few sips now and then of something, going along with spirituality, that's my thing. I've been giving a pretty good effort lately at yoga (not the stretchy kind), working on self-control, transmuting the various energies of the body. The yogis say alcohol isn't good for that, although I have a slightly different feeling on the subject, and so the sips are allowed. But there's no way I'm going to get drunk. But that doesn't mean I can't enjoy and even appreciate the fun habits and accompanying states of mind that Tipsy shows. I consider him a close personal friend at this point, and I can't think of anything that would drive us apart.
You know how most lushes have a pattern in life? They're struggling to get their lives on track, they swear off the booze, then two hours later they show up drunk? That's not Tipsy. Left to his own choices, anything apart from solitary confinement and lack of access, he's going to be boozed up, lubed real good. And spaced out, talking with a slurred voice, the whole bit. It's a lot of fun to imitate him, stumbling over your words, like the old comedian -- one of the funniest guys of his time -- Foster Brooks. I watched Foster on YouTube lately, and had the same feeling for him as in the '70s: I like the drunk voice a lot but still don't like how he bottoms it out so often. Just me.
Tipsy's not extremely verbose. He's mostly in a more enviable condition, the complete, total, beautiful miasma of drunkenness. He's just there, more or less worthless for any and all practical pursuits, but happy and apparently even centered in himself. That's the good drunk, unlike the bad drunk, which involves staggering and personal endangerment. Tipsy usually looks very contented, sitting in a chair, the bottle dangling from one hand near the floor, with his head pushed back, face toward the ceiling, in his own world, his own personal haze.
It'd be interesting to read his mind and know what's going on in his thoughts. Is he tapping into realms up there that would yield new and more wonderful answers? Is he working through visions and dreams that might make a difference to humanity in, perhaps, coming up with an answer to man's troubles? Or is it just what it looks like, a guy so bombed that if even the slightest thinking's taking place, there's still not two coherent thoughts joined together, nothing of cognitive syntax of any form that would make sense in terms of our current prevalent consciousness?
Looking at some of his ideas for articles for the newsletter, most of them aren't what you'd call deep stuff. He's very anti-cop and he doesn't like to be hassled. I can only imagine what it's been like for him, off on these beautiful multiple-week drunks and having to be hassled by the fuzz. Wouldn't you just like to take the fuzz by the lapels sometime and say, "Lay off, copper, my friend's not hurting anyone. Take your officious, self-righteous, crock of crap lawman pretentiousness, and get the hell out of here! He sleeping it off, as you can perfectly well see, because there's a party tonight he doesn't want to miss."
I said I had some spirituality going on, remember? Even the Good Book says drinking is fine. I'm looking it up. 1 Timothy 5:23: "Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities." So water's out and wine's in. Something for your stomach, which is where liquids go. And something to help with infirmities. Let me do some interpretation of the verse. It says "Use a little wine." I like that. Going by that, it's all relative, use what you need. If wine's OK, anything else you need would be OK too. The same principle holds for the phrase "thy stomach's sake." All other body parts might benefit. So, in Tipsy's case, he's got all the bases covered.
Yes, Tipsy's an all right kind of guy. If I wasn't for the whole yoga discipline thing -- and I'm extremely faithful to it -- I wouldn't mind joining him. Tip up and down a bottle of rye, I'd be lubed too! I met this guy one time and we got on the subject of drinking. I asked him, "Do you drink?" He goes, "Nope ... I guzzle."
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