I don’t want nothing anymore
I want everything
No one should have to think about who the president is and/or who the president is going to be every single day of their lives like this. The American people should be worrying about other things. Like dragging the hose out to the front of the house and spraying down the second story windows like you're a firefighter except the fire you're trying to put out is made of spiders. Blasting all of the devils back to Hell. And then going to bed and wondering if you got rid of enough of them that they won't crawl in through the cracks in the windows directly onto your head and lay eggs inside of you and then the eggs hatch and hundreds of baby spiders spill out of your face like a spider nosebleed.
Maybe that's just my thing lately.
Today Rax King joins us once again with a funny and moving piece about sobriety and how you don't necessarily have to stop being a scumbag just because you stopped drinking.
"It was time to want something else, to want without such meager limits, without immediately smothering every spark of desire and curiosity under a blanket of intoxication," she writes.
Most recently she wrote for Hell World about how you don't have to follow any of the expensive and outdated wedding traditions if you do not want to.
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Real quick before we move along here please enjoy this video I watched last night of Nirvana on SNL in 1992. They sound and look amazing. But even better than that is Chris Farley dapping up Kurt as the credits roll.
I love this shot too. Phil Hartman right next to them dancing with Julia Sweeney. A bunch of ladies in the cast looking up at Krist like hoo mama.
I don’t want nothing anymore
by Rax King
I got sober and cried, first and foremost, for the rebirth of my inhibitions.
For a decade and a half, I’d been razing those inhibitions to the ground. Now they would grow back, fast and unwanted as weeds. I’d long used alcohol and drugs to strong-arm myself into a bon-temps-rouler gregariousness that didn’t come naturally to me, and it was hard to face the fact that the personality graft didn’t take. Miserable, I said my goodbyes. Goodbye, strangers I flashed. Goodbye, man who went down on me on a table at Alphaville. Goodbye, guy who didn’t think I’d really stub out a cigarette on my own leg to fulfill a triple-dog dare — I’ll miss you most of all.
I know I did those things, because I’ve consulted the records. Photos of me showing my tits in this or that bar, texts between me and a coworker about times either he or I “went to Alphaville,” which had become our shorthand for going down on a woman in public. The cigarette burn, for its part, is still on my body, a faint ripple under my thigh tattoo. But the actual memories are fuzzy or missing or from the wrong point of view. Thanks to pictures, I know what my bare breasts looked like, but not the faces of the people I showed them to. The feeling of that man’s mouth between my legs fizzled on contact, unable to crack my layers of drunken dissociation, and as for the cigarette — who on earth was the guy who dared me to do that? Did I bother to get his name, or did I recognize, the minute I met him, that he was never going to be a name to me, only another experience I’d hear about secondhand the next day? I was building a mythology. The individual players didn’t matter.
But I was sober now, and determined to pack all those non-memories into a trunk I could bury underground. Alcohol made them, not me. They weren’t mine to keep. I still saw liquor as a svengali, a figure of dark and knowing influence over me that encouraged me to misbehave. The liquor was gone; therefore, I would misbehave no longer. Q.E.D. It was natural that I should miss the freedom I’d given up, but I was optimistic that I’d stop missing it as soon as I gained those nebulous qualities that people told me were better than partying. Wisdom. Clarity. Serenity. All that shit.
That was two years ago, which as it turned out was an inflection point for sobriety. “Sober-curious” had become a movement of sorts, particularly among young people, many of whom had quit without developing an addiction in the first place. More millennials than Gen Z-ers were drinkers, which seemed to indicate that the coolness of alcohol was being phased out. Suddenly, sobriety was no longer just some boring shit certain people had to do. It had become a fashionable aesthetic, one that dovetailed nicely with the various green juices and fitness studios that comprised a life of wellness. When sobriety wasn’t being conscripted into the world of wellness, it was appearing in suspiciously conservative trend forecasts alongside “celibacy” and “religion.” Either way, alcohol was just one more thing you quit in your quest to improve yourself, like carbs or seed oils. It was a quest that never meant expanding — only whittling-down and giving-up.
Sobriety’s associations with asceticism have proven hard to shake, maybe because the Alcoholics Anonymous model is what we know best. (I’m very pro-AA. I wonder if I’ll ever manage to write about sobriety without feeling obligated to say so.) This model treats alcoholism as a disease of the body and ego alike. In order to cure the body, the addict must put his ego through the twelve-step program that leads to sobriety, a program which centers around surrender and making amends — around self-improvement, essentially. Looked at from a certain angle, the program’s emphasis on surrendering one’s ego gives it a distinctly religious cast. The AA model and the wellness model agree that asceticism inherently confers some mystical reward. Alcohol: the thing you give up. Improvement: the thing you get.
In The Recovering, Leslie Jamison’s memoir of addiction and sobriety, she writes that she didn’t quit drinking because she no longer wanted to drink. She did want it, more than anything, same as always. That’s why she quit: it was the only way she could imagine a future where drinking wasn’t the thing she most wanted to do. It was time to want something else, to want without such meager limits, without immediately smothering every spark of desire and curiosity under a blanket of intoxication. This wasn’t just sobriety-as-optimization or sobriety-as-self-improvement. She’d grown weary of trying to live her life in that narrow corridor that only leads to one place. She’d realized how fundamentally boring it is to bounce off those walls all day long. I did too.
At first, sobriety was like getting locked out of the world — the world I knew, anyway. From the time I was a teenager, I’d only bothered living one kind of life. It was rich and full, or at least it felt like it must have been rich and full, textured as it was with unusual experiences. But I look back and see that they were the same few experiences. Again the sex. Again the wasteful and inefficient snorting of coke off of body parts. Again the loud, intimate conversations that I could never quite remember the next day beyond a faint sense of embarrassment. In forswearing these, I, too, believed I was becoming an ascetic.
And I looked forward to collecting my reward, in the form of a self-actualized me who would finally have her shit together. For that Rax, sex would happen at nine p.m. once a week — that was about as often as I figured I’d be able to stand looking my husband in the eye and feeling his hands on me, directly on me, not on the padding my drunkenness left on my skin. She’d do chores with enthusiasm, this new improved Rax, and she’d never miss a deadline because her memory would no longer be a black screen. If alcoholism had made me selfish, surely sobriety would make me selfless. I craved the ego death that I fancied would make all of this feeling and remembering and abstaining worthwhile.
Life with a drinking problem had been easy in that I wanted very little. The appetite itself may have been big but, directed towards a single end, it felt manageable and logical. I pursued only men who went well with bourbon and coke. Professional achievements felt good enough, but celebrating them with a blackout was what I really looked forward to. Alcohol subsumed every interest I might have had outside of it, all of which only got in its way. I’d become a rudimentary creature, chasing only one instinct and jettisoning whatever didn’t help me catch it. In sobriety, my want has swelled to fit the much-bigger me it’s contained in. I don’t want nothing anymore, I want everything.
At first, I wrote: sobriety has made me ruthless. But it hasn’t, any more than it was ever going to make me selfless. Ruthlessness is just something I’ve excavated from myself since I quit drinking, this frantic drive to snatch up what I want. I thought I’d stop wanting sex so badly — sex and blackouts having been constant companions throughout my adult life. It turns out what I really wanted was to feel it and remember it, not to give up the wildness of it. I could call my sexual behavior a fluke if sex was the only thing that still brought out the greedy scumminess in me, but no: I’m still lazy, I still eat grease and sugar for every meal, my work day is still too short and unproductive. At any given sober moment, I’m embodying between two and four of the seven deadly sins. My brain remains a radioactive hub of chaos. It’s just that, when it schemes and sizzles now, it does so unimpaired.
It’s time to divorce sobriety from its associations with asceticism and giving things up. What sobriety has been for me, on balance, is less a giving up than a trade: intoxication for expansiveness. Yes, it’s just me in here, awake, naked, plotting and hungering. But look at how much more of me there is to feed now!
Rax King is the James Beard award-nominated author of the essay collections Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and the forthcoming Sloppy. She lives in Brooklyn with her toothless Pekingese.
Rax is so good buddy. Previously she wrote for Hell World on the film Priscilla, Lana Del Rey's Born to Die, the band Creed, and her favorite Weezer songs.
But one of my favorite things she ever wrote was the cover blurb for my most recent book A Creature Wanting Form.
Here are a couple of excerpts.
Predator mesh breach
There was a softball-sized hole in the fence of the flamingo enclosure and so the fox slipped through it thinking can you believe this shit? Doing Jim Face at the camera and wondering if it was some kind of trap. This is my exact thing he thought. The one single thing they famously don’t want me to do.
The birds’ wings had been clipped by the zoo and so there wasn’t much they could do in terms of escaping now that flying away was off the table. That was basically their only move. So the fox got to work killing everyone with his teeth and claws and by the time he was done there were twenty-five dead flamingos. It must have looked like the hallway scene in Oldboy in there.
What were the logistics even? Did he take them out by the ankles first or what? Flamingos are pretty tall and a fox is maybe ten pounds at most. You would have hoped it wouldn’t have been all that lopsided.
There was never any chance the fox was going to be able to eat that many of them in one go or maybe his entire life but when they all started panicking a switch must have flipped in his brain and his instincts took over and he went out there and played like Jordan in Game 6 against Utah.
The people at the zoo said it was the first predator mesh breach they’d had in decades. They said they’d inspected the fence just recently in fact.
You can imagine whoever was in charge the senior bird guy doing his rounds and coming across the carnage and going are you shitting me? They’re gonna have my ass over this.
One of the zoo people said they saw the fox run off just as they showed up to the scene of the crime and they still haven’t caught him.
The fox had killed one rare type of duck too on top of it all they said. The duck wasn’t even supposed to be at work that day he was covering for his buddy. None of them were supposed to be there.
Bones for running
A dragonfly bungled its way into the car as I was pulling into the parking lot at the new Market Basket up the road and I tried to backhand shwoop it out but it got itself turned around somehow and started ping- ponging between the dashboard and the windshield real fast like one of those videos you see now and again where the guy is twenty feet behind the table and still wailing winners across the net bink bonk bink bonk bink bonk bank. Both of the guys. Like missiles. Like dragonflies honestly. Look at this dumb idiot though. With its wings flapping so invisibly. How fast they go but useless now. A helicopter in a garage. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution only to be defeated by the sensible and safe affordable interior of a Toyota Corolla. This guy’s ancestors had two foot wingspans and knew what dinosaur blood tasted like. I thought of our own great great grandfathers stepping out of the time portal at five foot eight with the vest on with the rustling watch chain and the high pants and their stinking dirty asses all spitting in god’s face if they lived to sixty-five and here’s us now sitting on our computer nineteen hours a day being allergic to milk and living to one hundred without even noticing that it’s profane. I turned the defogger on high cool and hoped it would sort of wind-pulse him toward the open passenger window but despite having a head almost entirely made of eyes and being able to fly in a way that every evil scientist defense contractor alive is trying to replicate with robots he was totally chunking it. He was gonna die in the cranny there for nothing. In the nook. Just on account of how the wind blew him into my car. I was going to let it all play out off camera while I went inside to purchase the water and bread I need to make me alive but I felt bad so I went to gingerly nudge the guy onto my outstretched downturned hand so I could usher him back out into the sky world but he moved weird at the last second bink bonk bink and I put my finger through his little ancient skull and some of it ended up on the glass and the smudge stayed there for a good long while. All those scary little teeth accounting for scale of course and it came to nothing with respect to self-defense. It was like the bugs got together and put on a production of The Opposite of Jurassic Park where the people were the monsters. I guess they must have had their own version of Sam Neil and all of them on their side trying to save this guy and save the day for everyone but I wasn’t aware of them as of yet and there was no way they were coming up behind me laying an elaborate trap. There was nothing that was ever going to get my ass as far as I knew. I was doing what came naturally. I thought maybe in the original movie the dinosaurs were just trying to help the humans go back to where they came from.
An international incident
There was a shooting yesterday that was one of the ones that was big enough that we all had to know it had happened so they sent me out to lower the flag to half-mast outside work. Half-staff they call it on land I don’t know. I looked at my phone out of habit on the way back inside and there was another shooting going on. A real nasty one it looked like.
It wasn’t immediately clear to me what the protocol here was supposed to be. If I were meant to put the flag all the way back up to reset things or lower it halfway down again still.
They had fired the main flag-knowing guy last month who had been in the National Guard a hundred years ago or something and this wasn’t really my job in the first place but I said I’d do it so I wouldn’t get fired myself.
I figured I’d be proactive so I lowered it down to the ground to one-third mast and went back inside feeling fine about it and none of my bosses seemed to care and then there was another shooting by the time I got to my desk.
I went back outside again and lowered it further still.
The next day I came in to work and you won’t believe what happened.
Now we were in a Zeno’s Paradox–type of a scenario vis-à-vis the flag height and its approach to the soil. People inside were debating what the definition of a mass shooting was and the managers were getting a little pissy about how work was being waylaid by all of us streaming the news on the computer all day. Trying to find out what kind of guy it was who killed everybody this time. Everyone hoping it was the other type of guy to balance it out. Like trading free throws at the end of a close game.
Being sort of new I was left to my own devices so I went out and lowered the flag halfway closer to the ground once more.
Probably not worth remarking on what happened by the time I came in the next morning and the next one too and just between us I was running out of real estate there height-wise with the flag so I went around back to the maintenance area to look for the custodian but there was some kid there instead who said in his cockney accent that the guy had been sacked so I borrowed a shovel from this kid he was an actual Victorian child with a sooty face smoking a cigar and everything and went back out to the flagpole and started digging to give the flag some breathing room so it would never have to touch the ground which was considered poor form in the flag community.
I had dug halfway to the molten core by the end of the next month but on the upside I was bulking up. The planet itself was spinning on this flag pole’s axis now. I was going to hoist an upside-down American flag in a country on the other side of the globe at this rate. It was going to be a whole international incident. People were going to get shot over it.