Danny Doom’s Booze Cabinet

Roger Ebert writes about his inability to eat or drink or speak.  Sounds awful. But he can write, very well, and I’m thankful for that. Of special note in this post are the references to Cormac McCarthy (the great writer), Dublin and Trinity College (where I visited a few years back), and the Old-Timer’s Restaurant on Lake Street (where I used to go when I worked over there–a great old pub). Can’t say it enough: I’m very glad Ebert is still putting this out, despite his condition.

A great article over here by Roger Ebert on the good old days drinking at O’Rourke’s Pub. Makes you wanna drink, if you ask me. But I’m just on cough syrup tonight. It’s been like that this week.

We regulars knew each other. We dated each other. We slept with each other. We went to Greek Town together, with Al presiding at the head of a long table. We met on Saturday mornings at Oxford’s for “recovery drunch,” spelled with a d.

The 1968 Days of Rage demonstrations passed nearby, and Jimmy Breslin and Norman Mailer came in. We watched the moon landing and the protests after Martin Luther King was killed. We sang, laughed and cried. We rehearsed the same stories over and over. I said we knew each other. We knew who we said we were, who we wanted to appear to be, and who O’Rourke’s thought we were, and that was knowing each other well enough.

Speaking of drinking, I was stopped at a light tonight and saw a guy on Fullerton with a boot on his car floor it. He dragged the car down the street and around a corner in a smoky, screechy mess, it was hilarious.

I say up there that in The Booze Cabinet you will find beer, ideas, fiction or ice, but rarely do I come through with the fiction. There’s lots of beer and ideas and ice…but no fiction. So here’s an excerpt of a longer piece, completely out of context and only explicable if you read the whole thing. Which is not finished of course, but godammit, I’m working on it. Enjoy, or scratch your head:

Such sadness, to be cognizant of all of life’s missteps and undiscovered treasures before the end, enough to put it down on paper. Poor woman. It was unfair. I don’t know that we all deserved better but she certainly did. And so where had I not been and what had I not done? The list was endless. The rain slowed to a drizzle with occasional flashes of lightning across the night sky and my head swam with dark thoughts, the gloom of unfinished business. I talked to Ben about Sandy and how I was pushing her away and then there was Dora, and I tried to explain about the magnet she had placed squarely in her crotch. “You’re hopeless,” he said, of course.

He was right about me—it was sick how easily I fell back into it—but I was all caught up in the drama and I had no intention of figuring out why or trying to change. It made things more interesting, to pathetically hop from one failure to the next, getting burned or burning it all down, the romantic arsonist. She was right, that sweet innocent at the Courson House, it was a world on fire, and no wonder I loved that falling star. Ben didn’t understand at all and to his credit he simply ignored me and got to the point.

His mother’s note requested a desire to be littered across the “dry death heat and cactus landscape” of the desert, never having visited such a climate, not once in her life, never even crossing the Mississippi to the west, it was like some fantasy foreign land she had only seen on television or in pictures. I sat there thinking about it and grew more and more depressed. There was no way anyone could properly fill up a life. There would always be something left, always somewhere else to go, and in the end we would all have to accept that the world held places we would never see, pyramids, jungles, exotic locales; mountains, skyscrapers or a burning hole in the ground where a satellite fell. Somewhere was a girl I would never meet, standing at the foot of the Great Wall or walking the beach on a remote island in the Pacific, or maybe just around the corner on a street I sometimes walked. She would close her door just as I went past and go inside to an empty house and I would see a shadow behind a curtain and then a light switch off. It was a world too big, a life too small, and I could hardly move, paralyzed with despair.

Ben shook me out of the haze and demanded that I accompany him. “I can’t do this alone,” he said, “I need a witness. It would mean a lot to me if you came.” I wondered if his mother had simply given up waiting for the course of her life to change, given up on anything but the routine and invested it all in her son. The Burden of Benedict. And were we living the life she was never able to? I had a hard time believing that, not this life.

“A son has to fulfill a mother’s wishes,” I finally said.

We were living within limitations. Why? Why follow the guide? Why allow the cock to rule the mind? I was angry at God for not existing and for allowing me to exist. It was going to have to end somehow—and alone and without warning—and who would I leave behind? I thought of Walter and his false sense of comfort. What part of the equation had he left out in order to find peace? Eternal happiness and proper salvation and superstition and empty slogans. Another conversation, never started, never finished. I wished to have never lived and to never have to die and I could feel the fury building and the terror and the misery and all the while Ben stared at me slack-jawed and maybe even slightly amused.

“Is that a ‘yes’?”

In lieu of a booze photo today, we have a little Jack Nicholson moment from “Easy Rider.” Here’s to old D.H. Lawrence:

Nixon’s back in the news with more tapes–always more tapes–and fun-loving quotes that will continue to shape new generations of opinion toward him. Like this gem:

“There are times when abortions are necessary — I know that. . . . Suppose you have a black and a white, or a rape.”

When it comes to the Original Dick, though, I like to defer to the good Doctor, Hunter S. Thompson, for words. Such as:

If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

Pure beauty. God, I miss Thompson. But one quote that really sticks out, that gives some perspective, is this one from 2004 regarding the potential (re)-election of George Bush:

“Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for — but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.”

I really don’t have the desire to get into Ayn Rand and all that–I long ago rejected her “philosophy” after reading The Fountainhead and loving it, and then reading Atlas Shrugged and realizing that I hated it about halfway through. This was 15 years ago or so. Now, people are talking about “going Galt” and I find as goofy now as I did then, but I have the added value now of being able to see that the people who are espousing these theories are right-wing goofballs. So it kind of reinforces why I hated it so much in the first place, before I actually knew or gave a shit about what right or left-wing even meant.

So I read this post by Matthew Yglesias this morning and thought it funny–in a sad way–and thought I would pass it on, and leave it at that. It’s a response to a really goofy column by Caroline Baum at Bloomberg.com in which she tries to go Galt with today’s headlines:

In Rand’s magnum opus, the “men of the mind,” as she calls the nation’s producers, quit. Literally. They walk away from the mines, factories and businesses they built as the government tries to deprive them of their wealth through increased regulation and taxation.

Can you just imagine all of these rich dudes sitting down and reading Atlas Shrugged and thinking “yeah, that’s what I’ll do!”? No, you can’t. Because they’re not. Sales of the book are up because not-so-rich dudes are buying it and thinking “yeah, that’s what I’ll do!” These are the same not-so-rich dudes who vote against their interests with the Republican party again and again. (I use “dudes” loosely, I’m sure there are women who share this same flawed way of thinking.)

I’ll sum up for you why “going Galt” is a fantasy philosophy inspired by a work of fiction that will never happen in real life:

The “men of the minds” who run everything and make all the money will never go Galt because they are too in love with the money they make to leave it. Let me know when the first man of wealth does it, I’ll eat my hat.

UPDATE:

By the way, this is for sure not the only reason Rand’s Galt is a fantasy. I could go on, but I’m gonna go all Galt and quit right now.

Milk at Midnight #4

bite-size stars obediently dance in your brain -they couldn’t be that small in real life but when the explosion’s over you’ll have evolve-melted into an angel that can’t even see stars, ’cause whaddaya know, you’ll be livin’ in one – so that’s where they were hiding heaven!

- 12/12/08 Empty Bottle

Thax Douglas

I read New York Magazine sometimes, and yet, I live in Chicago. Some things are just beyond explanation. First it’s the NY Times, now this. Why don’t I just move? Because you are special, Chicago, and I can’t live without you and your cold, cold winters and awful public transit system and general grittiness. Oh, and your awful sports teams. I can’t get enough!

To the point: The Sex Diaries. One very good reason to read New York Magazine. That’s all.

About that book I am just about to finish . . . No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy . . . I started it the other night and read half of it, boom, and only sleepy eyes kept me from going right through it. His latest, The Road, is waiting for me when I’m done. Great writer, this Booze Cabinet highly recommends his work.

I noticed that this book is about to be released as a film, by the Coen Brothers, no less, in the next month or so. It is the third film of late that has been based on a book that I have read, the other two being Into the Wild and The Kite Runner. Great books that have all been reviewed favorably (four stars for the these latter two films from Roger Ebert). I haven’t seen any of them, of course, but they are on the list, right after The Darjeeling Limited, (3 and a half from Ebert). So many great movies!

Anyway, I am excited to see what the Coen Brothers do with this McCarthy novel, they never let me down, unlike the Cubs.

Here’s some good news: a couple of right-wing nuts who wanted to ban books got beat in a suburban Arlington Heights election:

“Somewhere, Kurt Vonnegut is smiling…Vonnegut, who died last week, wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, one of nine books a board member proposed dropping from classroom use last year.”

Amazing, the world that these people want to create for their children.

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Longtime readers of my burning and blistered Cabinet of Booze may recall the fun little segment we liked to call “Letters From Andrew” that used to run regularly around here. They were actually “emails” from my old friend Andrew that I would receive on an irregular basis but always filled with strange insight and illuminating knowledge. Well, Andrew disappeared for a while and I actually wrote to him some time last year to ask of his whereabouts and whether the walrus had finally got to him or not, but was met with no response. My concerns grew, but not a word came to reassure me. Andrew, I feared, had been lost.

Last night, to my great surprise, an email from Andrew appeared in my inbox with the subject titled “Hiatus has been lifted.” The email was so long (easily the longest email ever) that I couldn’t possibly re-print it here, but excerpts will have to do, because there is a lot to catch up on. I could probably do excerpts from this email throughout the next few weeks… So today, on this beautiful Friggin Friday, I present to you, once again, to the delight of hundreds, the return of…Letters From Andrew:

Danny,

The short of it is I’m back in business. Ready to jam and jam again. So get out the old toast and fire up that toaster, get the hair dryer too. You’ll need the hair dryer to make that much toast. Heat gun ever better. Me no full sentences always. Me see curly haired girl. Me like. Me track. Bright dot on radar. Always in that direction.

So do you think things will turn around 9/12? I’m going to be an election inspector 9/12 and 11/7. I’ve been doing this a while now. It will be different for me this time. I used to do it in a community center with about 10 districts voting there. This time I’ll be at a fire station in a tiny town. Why am I condemned from a big city? It looks like England won’t be testing positive for TB after a while. Goodbye TB. TB & W sitting in a tree…

Beneficial nematoads and diatomaceous earth. Not just regular earth, diatomaceous earth! I love saying that. Say it out loud. Not too fast, it’s over all too soon. If only it took an hour to say.

The coroner just said it was the potato salad at the picnic so he could go home. He didn’t have a clue. Like someone else will find out that he was wrong? That’s why being a coroner is such a great job. It’s up there with weathermen (oh, I’m sorry), weatherpeople. Ooohhh, I was wrong again for the 3rd time this week, what are you going to do fire me [ferocious laughter]?

A strange transaction late at night in an alley in which 3 bowling pins are traded for a bowling ball that’s been sawed in half,

Andrew

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I just saw this YouTube of Ramesh “Party of Death” Ponnuru on the Colbert Report and it’s pretty hilarious. It’s been a while, so I couldn’t resist a little note to The Corner letting them know how funny it was. And of course, I had to ask for some assistance as well:

Now, I have a book I’m writing entitled “War-loving, Murderous Death Monkeys: George Bush, The Republican Party and The Soldiers That Have Died For Their Electioneering Political Rhetoric, or, For No Reason Whatsoever.” Do you think the title is too short or lacking clarity?