I visited today with my friend who, to be totally honest, is insane. When I arrived at his home, he had already drunk 9 beers and began drinking at 3 in the afternoon. He was foaming at the mouth and drool was dripping down his face. There was food clinging to his scraggly beard. He had no shirt on and over the layers of muscle were slabs of fat. His shorts were old, thread bare, what once was probably white, but now colored by stains and turned grey. His underwear was showing, the clothes, what little there was of it, was awry. His parents apparently were renovating and their normal household amenities no longer existed. There was a blanket on a dust riddled floor. Everything was in darkness, but there was a refrigerator. The chair holding open the once and future front door held a laptop computer.
It felt like I had walked into a world where time and space had become bent and this man existed in the past and the present and he was twisted in between.
The last time I saw him, he reminded me of a homeless samurai warrior, a ronin. Crazed in demeanor, bedraggled, but still with that unique soul. Now, he was something different, greater and yet lesser. There was now an element of the has been sumo wrestler and the hermit who does not belong in the world. That’s the world he belong in, in truth, the world of an ascetic, in the truest sense, isolated from all inputs from the outside world.
He complained about the world, how he was wronged because he could not seek gainful employment because of his dual condition of alcoholism and obssessive compulsiveness (and other elements). He rationalized away why drinking was not a problem, using organic chemistry to explain it away, the metabolic pathways, the rate of reactions, just about everything available.
It was frustrating. I had to always try to stay a step ahead of him, using logic to counter logic to try and break the cycle of things he insisted upon. But it was always frustrated by tangents and rationalizations.
He blamed the scientific research community for creating an atmosphere in labs favoring alcohol as a reward for good work. He said that his consumption did not impair his productivity but admitted he was fired from his job because of it. He stated that his high school classmates were all alcoholics because they buy wine and other spirits and that has higher alcohol content-- never mind they may not start drinking as early in the day that he does or drink with the same daily frequency. They have problems. Society is at fault because of the perceptions of what alcoholics are like.
It never ended but it all can be reduced down to one simple statement: he is the way he is because society is wrong.
He’s right, there are elements of society that are wrong, but he does not choose to want to be a part of society. He is an individual that say’s he drinks only when he’s by himself, but he chooses to exclude himself from society. He states the friends from his past, who are alcoholics too (because they buy wine and other spirits) castigate him because of his issues, but he speaks in the past tense, of times long gone.
A whirlpool or funnel cloud, tornado or hurricane of ill fitting logic from a mind that is highly intelligent but now fragmented-- and there I was sitting in the dark listening to him complain about society.
“You’re just a complainer,” I told him, and silence descended upon the night. “You complain about what is wrong with society and the perceptions of the society we live in... and that’s it. At best you’re a philosopher. Do something about it if it bothers you so much. You can be a philosopher or a rebel. If you are a philosopher you can sit there and drink your beer and smoke your cigarettes you roll in post-it notes or you can do something about your philosophical beliefs, right or wrong, and at least then you can be a rebel. Think about it.”
I got into my car and left. An hour and a half into another’s madness had pushed me to my limit-- and affirmed to me the knowledge that my friend would disappear as the spiraling path he adhered to will result in the loss of who he truly is.
Revision:
He would recover in the end, through rehab and other efforts. His mind was never quite the same, but his soul never changed.
