This That Is and Isn't

Erlton Represent

This is me. This is me in a Tiffany display window working a run in my garter in the red light district of the mad and infamous. This is I, the slut with the sappy sermonizing. This is I spy with my little eye-in-the-sky (something that is pumpernickel). What kind of a drunk am I? Is it that specific bright-eyed and bushy-tailed guy in the A.A. meeting who says his drug of choice is “more” and has stories about snorting crystal with seven luchadors and a blind Uruguayan pimp and things of that nature? No. I am a drunk of dark impossibly depthless depths and cruel tongue like Patty Highsmith. This is me, a low bottom drunk even though there is only one bottom and that bottom is death, the crack of your neck hitting pay dirt, a real Dustbusting bonanza. In active alcoholism I had my kidneys fail a number of times and received a blood transfusion. The first kidney shutdown experience was so fucking nightmarish—certainly the worst thing I had ever endured up until then—that it would not be likely to enter the mind of a normal person (i.e. a normie) that I would in contravention of all sense proceed to go and do it to myself a couple more times. This is why the old-school recovery crusaders describe the disease of addition as “cunning, baffling, and powerful.” One final reminder: physical craving and mental obsession are the two principal symptoms of addiction. But surely you already know all this. Do I belong to any organization whose foremost principle is that of anonymity? I’m afraid that I don’t really know how to answer that question.

This is me. I am Mimi. I am lionine and on the decline, pleased as a peck of pickled peppers. I have had a grisly fucking run of it so far this decade and because I don’t care when—not if, naturally—I die...well...nobody knows how far I’ll go. Not far, champ, I assure ye. I get dizzy getting out of bed. I am good at eliciting disgust and contempt. I am very often sad. I often wish folks were better able to apprehend that I have a mood disorder, not a cognitive one. What are you gonna do, that’s people and places and things outside your micromanaging-inclined control again, isn’t it? I remember that when I was hospitalized at Rockyview following the psychosis, public nudity, and frostbite incident, I begged the doctors to send me to Switzerland to be euthanized, still pretty loopy, and I can state without doubt that I had Jean-Luc Godard at least part in mind because of how deeply I had been touched upon discovering that Godard’s longterm common-law partner and creative collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville, who he had been with since the late-70s though the two were amicably separated and no longer residing together, had walked arm and arm with the great Swiss filmmaker to his final appointment [see photo directly above]. Clock that one as a plenty dignified exit!

Marianne Faithfull, "As Tears Go By"