SEAMUS IGNATIUS MULDOON, HIMSELF

MISERY THERAPY

               For 40 years I have noticed that whenever I am in discomfort of any kind whatsoever, the first thing out of the mouth of any woman I have been with at the time was the recommendation that anything I really like to do that is not sexual, and especially anything having to do with alcohol, must be avoided if there was any hope of recovery. It doesn’t have to be actually drinking the goddamn alcohol either. If I were to hurt my back, for instance, it would be immediately inquired whether I did it carrying in a case of wine. No one ever suggests that you might hurt your back carrying in a few cases of water, right? It’s carrying the wine that fucked up your back. You touched something that you like and now you are made ill by it. If it wasn’t something that you like to do, it wouldn’t have made you ill. And, as we have been taught since childhood, the only way we can overcome being ill is to endure something nasty – I think the expression is to take one’s medicine. In this vein, cure is also associated with atonement, a suffering of body, heart and/or soul as penance for having participated in something absolutely delightful. Nullum prandium liberum est – or something to that absurd pseudo Latin effect.

               They are conditioned by their mothers for generations beyond counting to make negative references about alcohol and anything else we like to do, except making love and going to church, at every possible opportunity. The implications of their attitude are that we men are here primarily for the purpose of being used by women as sex toys to gratify their libidinous tendencies and to work to earn the wealth sufficient to enable proper infrastructure in which sex may be enjoyed. They go to church, I am convinced, to seek attention from another man, a dalliance with the Lord, if you will, or with whoever claims that day to be acting as the Lord’s surrogate.

               If a man likes to do it, and if a man hurt himself doing it, no matter what it might be other than sex, it is inherently bad and it has some connection to alcohol, directly or indirectly. Men are bad. Therefore what men do, other than sex, is bad. And the reason it is bad is that men drink. Women must be ever vigilant against a tippling mate, because you know what they’re like when they drink, and what could be saved or spent on the women and on women’s priorities is being wasted on that fucking booze. Moreover, nothing infuriates them quite so much as a man who is not in an amorous mood for reasons of having enjoyed too much alcohol. They don’t give a shit about Ebola, Aids, Hemorrhagic Fever, Diabetes, or Cancer, but come home with a case of Whiskey Dick and you’re dead meat.

               Why is it that on the way home from any destination on the planet there is at least one pub? The reason is that no man can walk/drive past a pub without stopping in. A man can happily walk/drive past any church in Christendom without stopping in, but he can’t pass up a pub. What more proof do they need of the evils of drinking? Women go to church and men go to a pub. Why can’t they get it through their thick skulls that that is the way God intended it? If a particular tendency and practice has endured for millennia, it is because that is the tendency that the Lord implanted in us. Women go to church and lament whilst men go to a pub and enjoy the fruits of whatever it is that we may have fruits of. And if a woman has money in her purse, some of it is always wasted on the church. If some bloody priest pretends to be understanding and commiserates with them, they gleefully share their wealth. Then, when they have gone home, the bloody priests go over to the pub and join the men, drinking up what the women just put into the poor box or the loose plate, when they can’t find some sucker to buy the drinks. Buying drinks for a bloody priest is a waste of resources. It will not get you an ally when you need one. It will not get you a lighter sentence when you need to atone. The sumbitches will gleefully stick it to you, believing that their only allegiance in moments of atonement is to God and not to the guy who picked up their last few bar tabs.

               The only exemption from this is for the extremely wealthy. The extremely wealthy don’t have to put up with parish priests at all. Any priest who ever got into the face of a very wealthy parishioner would be skinned alive by his superiors. They are reserved for at least Monsignor and above, depending upon what “support” level they attain. It’s just a modern twist on the sale of dispensations. Not hating the sinner becomes easier as the sinner’s net worth advances. There is even a level at which no priest of any rank will ever bother you about anything. You don’t have to go to church ever in your whole life. You can steal, lie, murder, loot, rape and pillage. You will never be criticized. All you do is write a very large annual check. It’s like the Commendatore level of some club. If (and I can never imagine this) you ever felt the need to have the presence or participation of a priest, a very high officer in your diocese will appear instantly upon demand. Whatever you do, you want to avoid being a poor sinner. Your financial statement determines which rank of priest afflicts you – and they most certainly are an affliction.

               Why are women willing to subsidize drinking by priests, but not the drinking done by normal men? The reason is that they are not married to or living with the goddamn priest. The attractiveness of the priest is that the priest is supposed to be unavailable for sex. Priests lie, cheat, steal/embezzle/misappropriate/defraud, try to get into the knickers of the women who come to them for pastoral counseling and bugger children, but they want us to go sit for an hour or so and listen to the bastards lecture about right and wrong at least once a week. I’d rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick. Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall when the sanctimonious sumbitches are in private and joking about all this?

               Recently the temperance Nazis’ agenda has been kicked up several notches in the State of Texas. It is absolute proof that the other states of the union do not have exclusive rights to stupidity. The “DON’T LET MEN DRINK” sons-of-bitches and their Women’s Christian Temperance Union fellow travelers have “inspired” the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission to go on a campaign to stem the tide of drunk driving deaths in Texas. Now drunk driving deaths in Texas are statistically insignificant. Even in the big cities with mega attraction drinking emporia that offer every kind of “drink special” promotion imaginable to get the boozers into their establishments – the punks mostly – drunk driving deaths are ridiculously low. More people are killed for speaking out of turn than by drunk driving. The only cause of death with lower social impact than drunk driving is singing out of tune at choir practice. Even amongst the drunk motorcyclists the drunk driving fatalities are beneath the radar of any normal social concern.

               Not to be thwarted by the absence of facts to support their cry about a need to reduce drunk driving fatalities in Texas, these commie sumbitches now have their goddamn Gombeen men going from bar to bar to arrest people drinking in bars who they suspect of having drunk more than these assholes believe they should have. The bullshit theory is that if you arrest people while they are actually drinking inside a bar, they won’t have a chance to drive drunk when they leave the fucking bar. KISS MY FUCKING ASS! Now the assholes who go from bar to bar in this campaign are people who either don’t drink or who keep a mason jar out in the garage from which they secretly imbibe. Their idea of whether someone has had too much to drink is skewed by the fact that only a little is enough for them to be impaired – hell, they were born impaired if you ask me – and skewed even further by the fact that they are sitting in judgment of someone else’s state. If they were the ones drinking in the fucking bar they would insist that they had not had enough, let alone too much. But judging others is done with the harshest malevolent spirit. May God curse every mother fucking one of these bastards! There is no objective standard to determine who has had too much to drink. It’s the “call” of whichever little creep happens to be out looking for “sinners” in your neighborhood that night.

               Sunday’s paper ran a story on this “program”, reporting that there were really very few arrests in the bars of the big cities, where they claimed that there was so much drunk driving mayhem. Where there were a lot of arrests were in the smaller towns that have almost no drunk driving accidents. What this proves is that the program had no effect in the big cities, which means that it wasn’t necessary to have it in the first place. Why have a “program” that is utterly ineffectual? DUH! The other thing it proves is that small town assholes are even more obnoxious than big city assholes.

               HAHAHAHAHA!!! Today they announced that the stupid campaign is cancelled for fear of the prospect that decent people are going to start killing the bastards. The public outcry against their raging idiocy is so enormous. So many real people were so pissed off at the TABC that the Texas legislature, looking at a tough election year coming up, is lowering the boom on the damn assholes. And, would you believe it? The TABC assholes are actually stating that they will hold hearings in defense of their bullshit. They’re worse than the fucking Taliban. We must always be vigilant lest the assholes and sons of bitches in this world insinuate themselves into our social and governance structures in ways that enable them to become a bloody nuisance. GOD BLESS TEXAS!!

               Is it any wonder I am supporting Kinky Friedman to be the next governor of Texas? His agenda is to bring back the Texas that we all loved, when assholes were strung up from a nearby tree and given the same miniscule smidgen of due process that they give others. Governor Friedman will dewussify Texas if he has to do it one wuss at a time. When he is governor, any sumbitch that walks into a bar and starts deciding who has had too much to drink will be found the next morning out back all beat to shit, bloody, with roaches and fire ants crawling all over ‘em. Now that’s justice!

               Have you ever asked any woman why she married a man who was known to drink? The answer will never be satisfactory. It’s not as though there weren’t men around who are teetotalers. Why not marry one of them? The Templars of Temperance are out there in the ether and may be found by simple Google searches. They congregate in so-called secret orders, like the Sons of Temperance and the Independent Order of Rechabites, in which they have such really mature things as ritual handshakes, secret recognition signs, passwords, grips (whatever that means – maybe that’s where the expression “get a grip” comes from), emblems and bizarre rituals. Somehow they seem not to have staying power as organizations. People get tired of being weird and of staying always focused on the fact that their resume has as its signal achievement that they abstain from normal activities of real men. But, hey – they don’t drink! Think of all the bloody hand wringing and lamentational recriminations, always expressed in a voice that is calculated to alienate the hearer, that could be avoided. Could it be that marrying a man who doesn’t drink would deprive them of some critical life project demanded of them by their DNA? It is perhaps some hatchetation chromosome, that barely recessive Carrie Nations vestigial remnant, that compels women upon the path to rectification of the evil tippling inclination of the men they marry or otherwise consort with. And doesn’t it make for a perfect emotional transaction? A man drinks and a woman obtains a life purpose to object to it, always expressed in ways that cause a man to believe that one of the major reasons for drinking is that he is being nagged about it all the time. But of course, if the nagging were to stop, the drinking would continue. The obvious scientific observation here is that nagging may cause drinking to become more ardent, but the absence of nagging won’t stop a man from enjoying the pub experience. The only conclusion to be deduced from these truths is that the inclinations of men vis-à-vis the pub are an integral part of our personhood from the dawn of creation. Certainly God thinks so. When God decided to destroy humanity with a great flood, the only person whom God saved from destruction was the winemaker, Noah.

               Now this raises the question whether exclusive men’s clubs are established for chauvinistic purposes or merely as institutions where men can drink without being nagged about it. That view of it removes the objections to men’s clubs about their being politically incorrect, doesn’t it? The Men’s Bar concept is to establish a peaceful cocoon within which a man can do what God damn well intended for him to do with no hassle from women about it. Men who enjoy drinking together eventually start doing business deals together, and that, by God’s holy trousers, is the definition of a working economy. There can be no prosperity without free market capital formation of productive enterprises. There cannot be full employment without it. How then can women oppose tippling? It is so shortsighted of them to do so. Of course, women who would like to come in and drink with us and tell us how great we truly are would always be welcome. Women who would like to come in a drink with us and tell us how great we truly are, and who have great bodies and loose morals are even more welcome.

               It is a source of great satisfaction and joy that anti drinking societies always seem to be short lived. The only other great absurdity that relates to this Temperance Movement nonsense would be the Shaker religion, founded upon abstinence from sexual intimacy. Their theory was that their movement would grow through people who already exist converting to Shakerism. It was a great name, as I can just imagine what it was that men who abstained from sex were shaking all the time. May God rot the lot!

               What is the other side of this coin? The other side is that we men stop drinking and spend our lives in a cycle of work, sleep, eating, going to the bathroom, a few ball games every now and then at which there is no beer, go to church regularly, and screw our brains out on demand. Obviously, if we aint drinking, we will be constantly priapic, right?

               Will they even allow us to pick our nose, or does that become their next campaign? Nose pickers of the world, UNITE! Real men cherish that great feeling of digging a big one out that has been stuck way back there annoying you. Some of ‘em just can’t be handled by blowing your damn nose. You gotta excavate. Have you ever noticed that some men leave the fingernail on one of their little fingers long and wondered why they do that? They use that to go after impacted boogers. It’s the booger pickin’ fingernail. Those of you interested in learning everything there is to know about this subject can do a Google search on “nose picking” and access dozens of sites where important information, diagrams, pictures, history of the theories of nose picking and the social issues confronted daily by those who do it in public a lot. Have you ever wondered about encasing your baby’s first booger in a clear Lucite block? It’s the same as saving a lock of hair or a lost tooth that the bunny rabbit came and got and left a dollar for. All these great ideas are accessible via Google. Of course it’s also useful for getting the occasional morsel of food out from between your teeth when there aint no toothpicks on the table. It aint as good for getting at them humongous gelatinous loogheys that only a good sneeze does justice to, but a case hardened booger is tough to get out without the right tool and some patience.

               One of the funniest moments of my entire life was one night at Muldoons when some old gal sneezed out this giant looghey, and the damn thing took off, almost like in slow motion, end over end flying through the air and landed right on the bartender’s eyeglass lens. Everyone cracked up and the laughing continued for at least a minute or two. The old broad was so embarrassed that she just walked her bar tab. She was a heavy smoker and always hawking up them lung oysters and swallowing ‘em and saying YUM in a loud voice for special effect just in case you failed to notice that she had just hawked one up and swallowed it. You could hear it starting way down in her chest, a slow developing, very productive cough that rose like a crescendo in some dramatic musical composition, finally erupting like Mount Vesuvius. There wasn’t a guy in the bar who would kiss her after seeing her do that. It was enough to make you think twice about eating guacamole.

               When I used to live in Detroit, my doctor was a large Polish woman who had sat out most of World War II in the Dachau Concentration Camp. She had a lung oyster producing cough just like that and she was a chain smoker. She would even smoke right there in the examining room with her finger up your asshole checking out your prostate and making jokes about what she found up there. I once suggested she could cut back on the cigarettes and maybe that cough might clear up. Her retort was that if it weren’t for that cough she would have starved to death during World War II.

               That deep, congested cough has its own special sound. It’s almost a trademark, like the roar of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle engine. They ought to make recordings of it and play it constantly in every quit smoking clinic.

               It is my personal belief that, having failed at oppressive governance programs, the anti drinking bastards will now begin to consider alternative and more drastic approaches to eliminate drinking. Suppose, if you will, that they start looking around at what other aggressive “movements” in the world are doing to forward their agendas. How big a logical stretch would it be for the bastards to move from activism that can be thwarted by political reaction to activism that does not respond to the politics of any situation? If those wonderful folks in the Middle East can blow themselves and others up in public places, why not blow up saloons? AHA! Think about it. Isn’t that their next logical escalation?

               And if they did start bombing saloons, those clouds of vaporized beer, whiskeys and wines would suffuse the ambient atmosphere of the city. The aromas would be as pleasant as when a great chef ignites the brandy in a good sauce just before service. Inasmuch as those aromas are not unpleasant, there might not be such intense social reactions to the attacks as there are when there are suicide explosions in the Middle East. When a group of assholes over there blows up a building there is no cloud of viniferous effluvia. Rather, there is only the enormous cloud of vaporized detritus of the unwashed who perished in the apocalypse. The particulate matter in those clouds is almost entirely vaporized fleas and toe jams. YUK! We tipplers cannot, therefore, count on the same antagonistic reaction that we see every day when someone blows up a building or a market full of people in the Middle East. That is why I expect that the anti saloon leaguers are getting ready to move to saloon bombing. Furthermore, in their minds, the Molotov Cocktail would seem like the perfect and heaven sent instrument of their will.

REMEMBER – YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!