cheech

August 3, 12:01 a.m. update - I got a Journal dedication from Morgan today - if you want a link to her, she's right up in the middle of my Favorite SGs where she belongs!
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This is a satirical essay from a book that I xeroxed and have had on my desk for, literally, about 6 months... looking for a nice time to write it in here.

I had been writing short crap here... okay, well, more like posting pics mostly, so here is something of more substance, and it kinda ties in with WhiskeyFightPit's Journal so take it away, Mr. Louis Menand, contributor to The New Yorker:

- - - -LISTENING TO BOURBON- - - -

Reports of a drug said to relieve inhibition, promote conviviality, blunt the sex drive, and turn morbid misanthropes into jolly, can-do airheads did not come as a complete surprise to some of us, since we were already familiar with a substance that provides virtually the same medical benefits. How this product, which most people can acquire just by presenting a valid drivers license, has managed to escape the attention of psychopharmacologists is a puzzle. Still there is reason to be grateful to the philosophical branch of the psychopharmacological profession for identifying an issue that had, frankly, never seemed worth getting too ontologically bent out of shape about, and that is, of course, the question: Which is the real self? Is it the self on bourbon, or is it the self unmodified by bourbon?
This is not a matter to be approached glibly, for the problem of identity is a sea on which many philosophers have lost their way. Consider a bundle of sticks from which one stick is removed, and then another, and then another. After the removal of which stick does the bundle of sticks cease to be a bundle of sticks? Or takes the case of the knife whose blade has been replaced once and whose handle has been replaced three times. What grounds do we have for saying that it is still the same knife?
As with things, so with selves. The sexual stallion and future world-beater of nineteen, for whom three pizzas (1) and an accompanied hour in the back seat of a car are just the beginning of a decent evening, and the sagging commuter of twenty-five years later, who staggers home hoping only to have the stamina to make it through the first half-hour of Charlie Rose are nominally the same person. But by virtue of what? Of having the same Social Security Number? Identity is the artificial flower on the compost heap of time.
So that when we begin to talk, as recent best-selling speculation on the metaphysics of pill-popping teaches us to talk, about the bourbon-drinkers real self, we are immediately made aware of a certain fugitive quality in the object of our attention. Certainly the person who after taking bourbon saunters merrily across the room at a cocktail party and says, with a feeling indistinguishable from sincerity, Great to see you to someone he has never met is not the same as the person who, an hour earlier, waited for the next elevator so he wouldnt have to ride down with the boss.
But then, the person who has just finished a pint of coffee ice cream with cookie dough is, by every measure, not the person she was before she opened the freezer door. The person who has spent the night cleaning up after a six-year-old with a stomach virus is no longer the obliging and fair-minded chap he was when he bedded down the previous evening (2). The person who has paid seven dollars and fifty cents to sit through Intersection, starring Richard Gere and Sharon Stone, is not the person who thought this sounded like a really good movie (3). Mood transformations have many agents.
Probably the only thing to say about the real self, in short, is that it is, of all our selves, the one it seems the least pretentious to own up to. Is this the self that greets personal setbacks with a chipper fortitude, that chatters amiably with idiots at a party, that maintains a healthy nonchalance in the company of members of the opposite sex? Or is it the self that would rather drive aimlessly for hours than ask directions, that broods for weeks after failing to receive an invitation to a party he had no desire to attend, that worries obsessively that his new haircut is a complete turnoff? Most bourbon drinkers have no hesitation in identifying the first self as a complete fake and embarrassment and the second as the self that, given the way things are, it is most reasonable to be. Thats why they need the bourbon.
Its true that bourbon drinkers can experience unpleasant side effects unknown to consumers of faddish pharmaceuticals but bourbon has other advantages. A glass or two neat is as close as most people can get to feeling like a novelist or an Abstract Expressionist without actually having to write or paint anything-- a state thought desirable even by novelists and painters, and one that cannot be manufactured by mood transformers that come in capsule form (4). Sexual performance may be reduced by bourbon, but ribaldry, which is, after all, a much safer indulgence, is nicely enhanced. And for steady users death, when it comes, though painful, is mercifully swift.


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[Cheech footnotes]
(1) Three?? Wow.
(2) I should think, at that point, he could use some fuckin' bourbon.
(3) Jeeeesus, that movie.... one I truly love to hate.
(4) I would think some users of 'ludes and heavy downers might disagree