The Colt 45 Chronicle #52

Basking in the windfall of the first Sunday free of football in many months, I am returning to the collection of letters I wrote when I first encountered the metropolis of New York City once I had been eructed from Academus' Groves, what I am calling "The Colt 45 Chronicle" after my word-processing beverage of choice. I retrieved this collection out of storage last year during halftime of the Seahawks playoff elimination in Atlanta. It is fitting that next week the Seahawks compete in the Super Bowl against the Denver Broncos.

The only Vince Lombardy Trophy to be had here is one for stubbornness. To keep posting these letters when it is unclear what purpose they serve other than to document the voice of a young man -- submerged in alcohol, confronted by the insanity of the rat race for the first time, struggling with a flawed marriage -- seems to be an exercise in nothing more than will power.

This is a letter of appreciation to my friend Mark, who I mentioned before was living in Madrid teaching English. He lived with some Brits, who were also teachers, and they all drank and partied a lot. Mark would write these vivid letters about the night life and social scene in Madrid.

What strikes me about these drunken letters of mine written when I was in my early twenties is how right on they are. For instance, my assessment below of sexual entanglement with women is totally on the money. My problem is that I couldn't, like Diogenes the Cynic, learn my lesson quickly and take a short cut to virtue. It took decades more suffering and numerous failed relationships to make the message stick.

In any event, after I finish reading Stanley Rosen's Nihilism (1969), which I am currently working my way through, I should read William Desmond's Cynics (2008).

Autumn 1988

Someone who can write. Someone who can write a story, with a plot, about life not squaring up; a story, about crying over spilled milk, which is a story about love. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Nobody, nobody but you, Mark. Thank God. How wonderful a story can be. What a pair of evenings! I read along as a person who had once lived what you were now living but who has since become a toadie on the sideline -- all ash and, maybe, if I'm lucky, a little ember. Do it, man. Suffer a little for me. I'd quit my job for some of that action.

But you know my story. Majesty is an elusive thing; you secretly know it when you're in it, though it never seems like it; but you definitely know when you're out of it. I got drunk on Johnny's Red Label but had read your letter right before and I wanted to write you all evening, to tell you to keep fighting the good fight because most people don't even get into the ring. But there were people around and I couldn't. So I got drunk and then drunker and got into a fight with Colum and then puked. The big mystery I figured out that last year I was in Berkeley was that women can wash away everything, all worry. The problem is that it doesn't solve any of your problems, it just puts them off and replaces them with more immediate ones. But if you can learn your lesson from those immediate ones -- in other words, what Diogenes, the great Cynic, tried to do, namely, take a short cut to virtue -- you're years ahead of the intellectual game. More power to you.