It gets to you
sometimes. It really does. It starts with the perennial shortage
of money, and ends with a long walk home, half-cut and seething, wondering why
you’re doing this to yourself.
When money’s tight and your opportunities for distraction are thus
limited, if your chosen pub lets you down, it’s going to be a long time until
you can give it the chance to make things right again.
And in the meantime, you
seethe. There is a lot to seethe
about in this world these days, most of it to do with childish faith in
bankrupt economic theories and the shocking disregard in which our “elected”
representatives hold us. And I
confess, I seethe about these things on a regular basis. But (and I suspect it is by this and
similar mechanisms that the powers that be manage to get away with their
bullshit), they don’t make me anything like as angry, or trouble my sense of
well being half as much as being disappointed by an excursion to the pub.
I blame the particular pub
for this, and more than that, I blame the drinking culture in this town. In this I am justified. The fault lies squarely on an inability
to accommodate Bacchanalian excesses on a weekday. But as an individual within this localised society, ones
perception of oneself is coloured by that society’s perception of one. Given
that ones post-excessive, hungover state of mind is likely anyway to be touched
by the hand of guilt (for no good reason, or at least, no good reason that you
can remember), the perception of others – others who, it must be emphasised
again, are absolutely in the wrong - weighs heavily upon one.
It’s not enough to touch
your core beliefs, of course, but it saps the joy that surrounds them. Without that joy, without the lift that
the thought of going to the pub gives you (and this is all the more true when
your financial situation curtails the opportunities to actually do so), you
lose the sense of consolation, the sense that there is another way of being
which you can attain. If not right
now, then tomorrow or next week or next month. The pub, in any worthwhile context, smiles at you, it urges
you on through the quagmire of the quotidian, and basking in that promise
you’ll find a way to reach it. If
the pub frowns, then you’re lost, trapped in the festering, bubbling, seething
morass of other people’s misplaced – and misguided – morality.
The absence of a healthy
drinking culture means there is no community of drinkers that can be relied
upon and among whom you can take your place. You may, by chance, run into a few pleasantly inebriated
people at the bar, but it is a situation that cannot be relied upon to manifest
itself regularly. Bad nights
happen, of course, wherever you drink, but if there’s money, and a place where
your brand of merriment is more commonly appreciated, then one bad evening will
disappear in the alcoholic tide of other evenings. As it is, you’re beached, stranded on the polluted shores of
other people’s sobriety.
The truth is, under normal
circumstances, I could probably drink my way out of this impasse. Throwing alcohol at a problem is a
failsafe solution to most things.
Let down by the pub, though, the question arises of where this course of
existential therapy would take place.
That pub doesn’t appeal, and if that pub - which hitherto has come
closest to satisfying your socio-alcoholic needs in this town - isn’t working,
then the chances of any of the others doing so is small. When the symbiosis of pub and punter
has broken down, what is there that one can do?
Like getting back on a
bike after you’ve fallen off, you have to get back in there. A line must be drawn, a stand must be
made. In any relationship, a time
comes when you have to say, up with this I will not, cannot, put. And that time is now. So, as soon as money permits, I will be
there, drinking heavily for my beliefs, consequence be damned. I have right on my side, I have faith
in my heart. So cin fucking cin.
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