Oh! – and I speak out of later knowledge – Heaven forefend me from the most of the average run of male humans who are not good fellows, the ones cold of heart and cold of head who don’t smoke, drink, or swear, or do much of anything else that is brase, and resentful, and stinging, because in their feeble fibres there has never been the stir and prod of life to well over its boundaries and be devilish and daring. One doesn’t meet these in saloons, nor rallying to lost causes, nor flaming on the adventure-paths, nor loving as God’s own mad lovers. They are too busy keeping their feet dry, conserving their heart-beats, and making unlovely life-successes of their spirit-mediocrity.
Jack London, John Barleycorn
PART ONE
THERE IS ONLY ONE GOD AND ALCOHOL IS OUR PROPHET
Alcohol is the freedom you cannot do without. Freedom that no one can take away from you, like the Freedom of Profanity, the Frivolity of Lust, and the Desire for Something Better.
But Alcohol is much more beautiful than these, and that’s why it is the legalized drug of Exactly This Society. Women have nothing on the pleasure of drinking. Other drugs are too short-lived, losing their meaning in the swift and absurd death of you vomiting right into your trachea. This cannot happen to you if you’ve learned to vomit properly from the right drug.
ALCOHOL IS THE RIGHT DRUG
In the List of Harmful Things, the first four are Cigarettes, Alcohol, Women, and Meat – in that order. Every religion forbids exactly these four things, which at their core carry the creed of a Better World. A world full of pleasures one dies from, but not too painfully. Compared to the pain the World dumps on you from birth, the amount of pain Alcohol brings is negligible.
Alcohol is the best means of reducing pain. The most useful thing for jumping from one Human State to another. Alcohol is a catalyst for Human Behavior and a professional killer of Courteous Censorship. It is the liberator of long-suppressed emotions (from which one dies), and it is the Press Agent of the Main Brain and the Spokesperson for Spontaneous Desires.
Alcohol is your public space, your own media empire where you are Real. And Real means being content and wanting, beautiful and swollen, expressing yourself and dancing and stumbling, speaking with a beautiful language and speaking with a thick tongue, banging and not remembering, remembering and forgiving. To forgive and realize that actually the Lord will only forgive you if He catches you well drunk.
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