Mieze presents … On Absinthe, and Being a Drunk.

 

It was a birthday present from my father-in-law. He and I had had discussions about absinthe from the time I’d arrived in Switzerland. I was particularly interested in the subject, due to an overload of Rimbaud and Baudelaire years before, and just a few months before I’d moved over here and left the US far behind me, the long-existing ban had been lifted on the drink.

My father-in-law had filled me with stories of illegal distillation from his days as a young man, studying business in the French part of the country. Told me about Sundays when he would travel hours by train back to his girlfriend, who in time became his wife. Told me about the Sundays he couldn’t afford to pay the fare, and when he would stay with the family who was renting him a room. Told me about how, on hot holy day afternoons, they would pull out a verboten bottle from the cellar, break out the glasses and sugar cubes and spoons, and get their drink on in the back garden. Pleasantly buzzed, watching the dragonflies hum by.

And so, on my first birthday as a newly stateless person in a country I was struggling my way through, he gave me my first bottle of absinthe. 68% volume, and not at all green. We drank it together, my new family and I. We didn’t drink the whole bottle. The smell put me off, although when I was on my third shot, it didn’t seem quite as terrible as at first.

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I had, I have, a lovely friend who was here for four years and then moved back to the States this past summer after her marriage ended. Before she left, she asked me some questions about absinthe. It seemed her elderly mother wanted her to bring back a bottle when she left.

I pulled out what by then was left of my own dusty bottle. She examined the label, and then I offered her a drink. She had a shot, grimaced, and then asked me how to go about getting one for herself. I told her about the specialty bar in the city. I told her I’d go pick up a bottle for her, if she wanted.

I went to the bar, The Green Fairy. Bought a bottle of 72%, two of the traditional glasses, and two of the slotted spoons. Had them wrapped and brought them to her.
“Do you think I’ll be able to get through Customs?” she asked me.
“Why?” I asked.
“Well…” she said.
“Just pack it in the suitcase, not your hand luggage,” I told her.
She did, and it made it through without incident.

Weeks later, it was my birthday. I had a surprise gift—a bottle of the same kind of absinthe I’d bought for my friend. With the glasses, with the spoons. I drank the drink as it was intended for the second time in my life—positioned the spoon over the glass, melted the sugar cube, poured in the water and stirred.

It was sugary sweet, the anise taste tempered by the sugar. My teeth ached; I felt a strange kind of nostalgia that didn’t even belong to me.

One sweet drink was enough. I pulled out the shot glass afterwards, and had a few straight. The room did seem to spin after a little while, but there were no visions or hallucinations. I supposed, later, that if I’d kept drinking, I probably would have seen something eventually.

I’d taken a fast photo of the bottle and the prepped glasses. I posted it on my Facebook account. I had a couple of inquiring minds comment on it:

–Why isn’t it green?
–Delicious! But be careful with that stuff!

Clearly, the mythical Green Fairy still had her dainty, poisonous toehold. She still held the reputation of the dangerous drug of the artist.

But is she that, exactly?

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Look, I’ll spare you the suspense, right now:

If you drink absinthe with the expectation of seeing fairies and other worlds, if you indulge in the hopes of some hallucinatory door opening for you and fuelling your creativity or imaginary, ghostly fingertips soothing your brow, you’re probably going to be let down.

If you combine it with other things, or if you drink it until you’re drunk, then yes: You’ll probably see some things then. Or black out, or experience what anyone on a proper bender would. And you’ll probably get there faster with absinthe in the mix, due to its high alcohol content (which ranges from 55-89%, or somewhere between 110 – 178 proof). Other drinks pale in comparison, with the exception of a few—and if you want to know which ones are higher than that, look it up on Wikipedia or something, and I’ll say a prayer for your liver in the meantime.

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But then there’s the question of wormwood….

(Every time I hear that word, I’m instantly transported back to a childhood with Sundays spent on a folding chair in a hick Baptist church somewhere in the Midwest, trying not to listen to the preacher ranting on about revelations and eternal damnation:

The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water—the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter. –Revelations 8:10 and 11.

You know, memories like that, they deserve a drink. But I’ve digressed….)

Wormwood, or Artemisia absinthium, to use its proper species name, is supposed to be what makes absinthe so dangerous. Wormwood contains thujone, once incorrectly classed as a cannabinoid. This is what’s supposed to give you those fabled visions and unhinge you. The thing is, though, that my bottle of 72%– and every other bottle of European absinthe you can get your hands on—contains only very small amounts of wormwood oil, and thus, only low doses of thujone.

All right: The rest of this section was reserved originally for Rigby, my very kind friend, who’d offered to provide his thoughts about wormwood, and his experiments that might or might not make you see visions and inspire you to madness.

But Rigby is off the grid at the moment. And so this will stand vacant for him, thinking of him, hoping that soon he’ll grace me and you sometime soon with that secret knowledge. Although, knowing what I know of Rigby, we’ll probably all be rolling in the gutter holding our guts at a much later date.

But at any rate, no more about wormwood; not until he weighs in.

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So at this very moment, at this point in this post, you know basic things about absinthe. I could round it all out and make it much more flowery, but I’ve decided that one fond remembrance, a few basic facts, and a slightly deflating conclusion are enough. There are sites galore that can tell you much, much more than I ever could, and I’d encourage you to go to any of them if more is indeed what you want.

When I offered to write this for Dennis, who’d just got his blog archives back and had opened up DC’s again, I’d just been coming off a very drunken, very hot summer.

Then, nonsensically, I decided to go sober—at least for a while, which has made this rather difficult to complete. It’s now December.

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It made sense at the time, even though it was impulsive. It was a decision made when I’d woken up one morning, having bitten my lip so hard during the night that the blood had flowed and it hadn’t even startled me awake, because I’d had no idea of it. It was a night after I’d inadvertently insulted and upset someone I hold dear. There had been some rational reason in my head for the insult initially, but I’d carried it far beyond all good sense. I hadn’t had any sense left by that point. I was fucking, fucking drunk, and worse, I’d lied about how drunk I was.

I was so drunk that when I woke up hours later, I wasn’t even hung over; I was still drunk.

I started to examine the previous evening when sober. I was horrified, to be honest. My sensible reasoning, the thing I usually pride myself on, was lost in the transmission. It was lost in a sea of wine, and absinthe, and whisky. The fact I’d reached a moment when I’d added whiskey on top of absinthe, well, it shows you how numb and dumb my brain had gone—if I’d been thinking much at all, I’d have just stuck with the absinthe and kept going.

When I checked the kitchen and saw how much absinthe was gone, how many shots of whiskey I must have had, I cringed, and made my decision.

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I spent a lot of time thinking over my drinking.

I remembered moments from my 20s, when I’d worked for a personnel agency and was the main contact for a rather large bank in the region. I remembered nights of going out with the banking boys, the supervisors and managers. We lined up at the bars, neat in our very conservative suits like little American Psychos, waiting for the bartender to pour out the shots in a row. And pour again, and again, and again… Tequila without the pretense of the salt poured on the crook of your hand to chase it with. I was nearly always the only woman in the bunch, and I could hold my own with them. And because I was young, I would show up to work the next morning in a clean jacket and skirt, stockinged and heeled, scrubbed, perfumed and only slightly bloodshot that was mostly erased by a few eye drops. It earned me respect with the banking boys—that I could still be coherent and perform to expectations. I did it for years and there was never any comment, never any reprimand. I was good. Everybody said so.

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I remember how one of my friends, who was verging on blackout more nights than not herself, once told me, “My husband says you drink like a fish.” And I think my only response to her was to ask if I could sleep on their sofa, because there was no way I could drive home.

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I remember that when I went home for my father’s funeral, I never cried. He was gone and that was it, and it was like that proverbial monkey temporarily lifted off my back for once. Cleaning out his house, his cellar and workshop was a different matter. As I got deeper into the basement, my sister couldn’t take any more and left me. Went up into the woods and started hacking away at the monkey branches.

Monkey branches. I don’t know what they’re really called; I only know them as that from childhood, when they hung low and were thick enough to sit and swing on. I didn’t have a swing; I had monkey branches, and they were good enough. Now she was hacking them all down while I carried bottle after bottle of wine, scotch, whiskey out from under the workbenches and threw them with hardly satisfying crashes into that huge dumpster we’d rented. Sticky necks and dried little dregs; every bottle was empty. I didn’t find an unopened one anywhere.

I think I cleared out a whole liquor store inventory from that place.

It should have put me off drinking. That would have been a normal response. But when I was lying in his bed, in his bedroom alone late that same night, my thirst seemed to increase and I could only dream of oblivion.

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I am my father’s kid. I’m my father’s daughter. No one could deny it. He tried to, for years, but his DNA is in me and it looks like I got it, just like he did: I’m a drinker. I’m a drunk.

That’s my revelation, not even carried on the spittle of a brimstone Baptist, and it’s very bitter, indeed.

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It was a Thursday in November and I found myself in a state of mild anxiety, second-guessing a date I’d made to meet friends at the absinthe bar, with the idea that we might film a little of the experience and I could use it with this post.

I had been doing quite well with my sobriety; I hadn’t been drunk since the end of September. I’d kept away from all hard liquor. Now I was envisioning being in that bar and ruining that sense of equilibrium I’d managed to find.

In the end, I begged off. I decided I was going to try to write this thing, whatever you’d call it, without getting drunk to do it. Days kept passing, though, and nothing was happening.

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Social media post of mine, December 9:

Conclusion: What is absinthe? A beautiful, stylized disappointment. And nobody can tell me differently.

Related comments:

Friend: Oh poor deprived Mieze, then you have only bad absinthe.

Me: No, it’s good enough. But I never had any great visions. My bad. There are just better highs and worse lows. You know.

Friend: Same here, but still a fine tipple…

Friend: Madame, at this point, I would go all Pavlovian bitch for a fucking Miller’s High Life.

Me: Said like the American you truly are….

Friend: Or better yet a Miller’s tallboy.

Me: Just waiting for you to make the Rolling Rock comment….

Friend: I prefer Genesse Cream Ale, if we’re going all eastern cheap beer. And / or a bazillion Little King’s.

Me: I would say, –Be still, my beating heart. But I’ve got to tell you, I hate beer.

Friend: Single Malt Whisky?

Me: Better.

Friend: So madame, what is your tipple of choice?

Me: None at the moment. Sober as they come for the last couple of months. Who knows the future, though.

Me: It’s entirely self-inflicted. So we’ll find out the backlash in a while, I’m sure.

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–Why do I drink to get drunk? I’ve asked myself that question repeatedly over the last few months. I’d never bothered to scrutinize it in any serious way before. I hear these old things in my head, things that friends and colleagues have said to me over time, and I’m surprised I never paid them any attention before now.

You drink like a fish.

You drank that guy under the table.

I’m amazed you’re still standing and not on the floor. I wouldn’t even know you were drunk if I couldn’t smell it all over you.

You’re a real hard-boiled babe, aren’t you.

And those were the backhanded compliments; I’ve shrugged them off for as long as I can remember with a laugh.

I shrugged them off because there’s a component of true enjoyment to my drinking. I enjoy a drink and a cigarette. They go well together, and I enjoy the taste and the feel of the smoke in my lungs, and that warm feeling that spreads out through my body, how it makes me languid and relaxed, how it makes me feel like I’m still a member of the human race. And I know myself well enough to know that one glass will do absolutely nothing; two glasses will relax me, and the third will make me happy. Why don’t I stop there, then?

I drink to have some feeling of control, perhaps. Or I did when I started. To dull down pain, which is how, ironically that I know I actually am a member of the human race—I’ve got pain just like everyone else, and I need to control it somehow.

But the thing is, I don’t know when to stop; I don’t know when the pain is controlled enough. That’s the problem, and that’s what leads to communication like this:

…You started with that drunken idiocy… making no sense at all… Every argument and bad feeling has come from you… You maybe need to look at yourself a little more closely.

And what could I possibly say to that? Because it’s true, it’s accurate. There was much more said than just that, and it hurt to have to acknowledge any of it. I had a choice to acknowledge it or not. In the end, I chose to do just that, because pain control makes no sense when it only creates more of the same. Even I’m not so stupid as to see that. What good is pain control when it only hurts the ones around you?

–Not so much, in the end. It’s never worth that.

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I was doing well, but then I had a moment when I fell down, fell off. It came on December 15th, when I made a conscious decision to go out and buy bottles and restock what had been my dry household for an afternoon soaked in fumes. I did it selfishly and I did it because I wanted to, knowing that at the end of it I would be silent and docile and heating up a dinner I’d already prepared and going to bed early in an almost blackout, but not quite. And when I was still half-sober, or a little more than, I wrote this:

I’m so flooded with random memories today.

I’m thinking of the one I love. I can see that in spite of it all, my love has been quite selfish. And I hate that… selfish love.

I’m thinking of my mother, because today’s her birthday. I’m trying not to think of her too much, in fact. I can’t think of her without thinking of the pain she experienced in her life, and how it never abated, how it kept building and building and building. I still miss her, four years and some months after her death, but that feeling, my hurt that she no longer exists and has been gone for so long now, that’s secondary. I can never think of my mother and myself in the same sentence easily. She gave me love and she gave me pain, but that is nothing compared to what she dealt with in her life; and what overwhelms me is not the gulf that always existed between us, but actually that subsuming of how much more pain, how much more despair, took over her life. She started out under tough circumstances, lived her childhood in the Depression, through WWII, but it wasn’t until she married my father that the light went out of her.

I’m thinking of that trap of a house, 4189 H– Road, and how it had been abandoned for years and the owner had bricked up his honeymoon convertible in that seemingly endless tunnel of a garage. I’m remembering how I stood there, six years old, in the dim with only a single overhead bulb to illuminate, watching as my father broke down those bricks and found that car, and the field mice who’d taken up residence in it swarmed out, climbing the walls and scattering for safety. It seemed like hundreds, like thousands while he stamped on them and killed as many as he could under his work boots, while I stayed silently rooted to the spot where I was, terrified by all that frantic wildlife.

I’m thinking of how my father’s liquor and wine bottles replaced those mice, as that space became his workroom. With his punching bag and his hidden photos of other women and his screwdrivers and his saw blades and the rust and the damp and the spider webs, that space was a trauma to clean out; wishing there was a full bottle of something in there to give me enough balls to keep going. But they were all empty, and somehow I still kept going.

Me, drinking to oblivion today. If I could wipe out any or all of these thoughts, it would be right and good. But I have been drinking, to be perfectly honest. I’ve been drinking since 11:17 AM; I noted the time when I started. I’m nowhere near finished yet. I’ll be drinking until at least 17:00, and my hope will be that all of these things will have been banished from my head by then.

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Here’s the thing, and it was staring me in the face in the mirror this morning as I was washing up:

Oblivion today isn’t oblivion tomorrow. Not even I can fool myself into believing that. No bottle of absinthe, no bottle of anything is going to give it to me. So I get back on the clichéd wagon, while it moves slowly along at the trot of a worn-out horse, showing me all the debris of life on either side of it and behind it. It’s moving too slowly for me, and I want it to be sped up and I want lots of ground and safe space between me and what’s come before. I want cushioning.

But nobody gets that luxury.

I’m a part of the landscape, and I can see that, and I’ll just have to deal with it.

End, not end.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Those of you who are relatively new to DC’s possibly don’t know Mieze, an extraordinary writer, artist, and a very long time and beloved if recently quiet member of the ever evolving community of people who so kindly gather regularly around this place. She has written a very beautiful and lucid post for us today that I hope you will devote some time to reading. Should you do that, it will be an experience with immense benefits, I assure you. Of course, anything that results on your ends that you care to pass along to Mieze would be a wonderful thing, if you don’t mind. Thank you so much, Mieze. It’s glorious to have you and your mind and talent back here. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, Dóra! I think I’ve made it very clear to my blog that such rude behavior on its part will not be tolerated in the future, so hopefully the coast is clear. Puppy sitting, aw. The buche was and still is very delicious. Oh, I ended up getting this one. It doesn’t look like that anymore since it’s about half devoured. The illness I feared was arriving didn’t arrive after all, or at least not yet. Yesterday started okay with mostly work and relative quiet, but then in the evening Gisele called to let me know that this young dancer who was in the original production of our piece ‘Kindertotenlieder’, and who we’ve known since 2004, killed himself on Xmas Eve. He jumped out of a window. He had been living in Japan for a few years, and I hadn’t seen or talked to him in quite a while apart from a couple of brief Facebook chats. Anyway, that was quite shocking and disturbing news, and so I’m a little shaken up and very sad, of course. But, you know, life continues as it so strangely does. I hope both of our todays are much better than my yesterday. And how was yours? ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, indeed. A very interesting set of directors to a one. ** H, Hi. Thank you so much for saying that about the film post. How exciting that you’re studying with filmmakers. Did they know or like any of the directors I featured? No, I don’t know Jarman’s ‘Will You Dance With Me’. I don’t think I’ve even heard of it before, which is very strange. I’ll go see what I can find of it out in the ether. Have a lovely day whatever the day entails. ** Steevee, Hi. That’s very worrying about Amy Greenfield. I hadn’t heard that she’s ill. I so hope it’s something that she can pull through clearly. Yes, it’s certainly true that people have a kneejerk tendency to think your characters are your mouthpieces. And that your narratives are based on your real life. Etc. It can be very annoying. And it’s true that, although my anarchism infuses all of my work, I think the only time I’ve written in a direct way about it is in the fourth scene of ‘LCTG’, and, in that case, I’m just using anarchism’s tenets as a comedic structure. Well, you just need to find a make-up artist-cum-set-builder to work with you if you do direct. Mm, when I’m writing something, I do oscillate, yeah, for sure. I’m pretty confident about my writing itself after the years of doing it all the time, but I do go back and forth about my decisions about what to do with the writing. One thing I never do is show anyone what I’m writing or have written until I’ve sat on it and revisited it for quite a while. It takes me quite some time to feel confident enough that I can handle an outside opinion with objectivity. If I share something too soon, I just get very confused by others’ input in a counterproductive way. ** Hyperbolic_plain, Hi! Oh, I like it very much! Eternal gratitude. And thank you too for checking out the films yesterday. ** Joseph, Hi. Good, I’m glad the drunk/cat thing didn’t implode. I don’t have cats, so I’m free to imagine implausible horror scenarios, I guess. The poem is wonderful, man! I read it twice yesterday, and it really iulluminated my insides. I’ve heard of that book ‘The Emergence Of Social Space: Rimbaud And The Paris Commune’, but I’ve never read it. As all things Rimbaud-related inherently rivet me, I’m going to write down a note to look for it. Hold on, done. Thank you very much! And have a fine day, sir. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Benster. Oh, right, Boxing Day. I still don’t think I understand what that means or rather what one does to celebrate Boxing Day. Not box people, I’m assuming? ** James Nulick, Hi, James. Very happy to have been able to introduce you to those filmmakers. I really like editing too, whether it’s my own work or others’. I really enjoyed that part of doing the LHotB imprint. Editing is really the only part of wrirting that I truly love. When I’m writing something, I just can’t wait to get the raw material down so I can do the fun part of fiddling with it and wrenching it apart and polishing it and all that stuff. That’s probably one reason why I like making gif fiction a lot. It’s all just searching and choosing and editing. The apartment hunting has been on hold for a couple weeks because I found out that I need to have a French babnk account with a year’s worth of rent in it to be able to rent an apartment. I can’t do anything until that’s in place, so I’m in the middle of setting up that account, and it’s not an easy thing to do, but I think it’ll be in place before too long. Then I can start hunting again. Have a super day. ** Right. Please give yourselves over as meaningfully as you can to Mieze’s text and post today. Thank you very much. See you tomorrow.