Quickness

Another bar, another beer, and another cry for help offered up to my friends as a conveniently digestible aphorism – the only times one ever feels like a normal person are when one is working or drinking. The rest is scary and confusing. I think most of my drinking buddies like it when I tie things up in neat little packages like that. It makes it seem less like I’m making pleading personal confessions and more like I’m making some insightful commentary on the human condition in general. It’s less confronting. Who likes ‘confronting’?

People are always at their most sincere when being flippant. The truth always comes quickest as it’s at the top of the web of lies. It’s both a defence mechanism and a cathartic necessity. Get it off your chest, then palm it off as being a joke. Ha ha, aren’t I clever and naughty. *dusts off hands* Scott free.

It doesn’t help that cruelty is so entertaining. The truth is so often cruel and, so slightly more often, hilarious. A cheap shot’s a good shot. Perhaps that’s why people get so uncomfortable when you openly offer up your own truth. Why would one do that to oneself? What am I walking into here? What manner of cruelty are they trying to draw out of me? Perhaps that’s why I find it expedient to make my personal misgivings into a complaint of a generation.

The only times people ever feel normal are when they’re working or drinking. Tidy as it may be, it’s also largely true. These are the times when we… fuck it… when I’m sufficiently busied or blinded by the activity at hand that I don’t need or feel or want – I just do. The time spent always passes quickly and is usually unremarkable, but it is quiet and untroubled. I appreciate it.

I would wish it more often, or in other facets of life, if I didn’t fear the whole thing might just pass by in an unremarkable quickness. But isn’t that always the way – he says, drawing yet another leaf from his Mammoth Book of Maxims – when life is busied, passing quickly, we always wish it to slow down, yet when life slows down we wish it to hasten. I’m getting good at these self-reflexive adages – one might say good in the worst possible way.

I like work. And I like drinking. They are genuinely the times I feel most at home these days. Perhaps because those are the times I’m surrounded by friends. Maybe I’m an alcoholic. That’s possible. Maybe I’m a work-a-holic. Yeah, that’s pretty fucking unlikely. I guess I’ll just have to continue my research. Which is lucky – there’s a lot of working and drinking in my immediate future. At least I know I’ll be safe and happy and normal. That’s the truth.