Whatever Gets You Through The Night Is OK With Me by Tosh Berman

 

Whatever Gets You Through The Night is OK With Me by Tosh Berman

Tosh's Journal: September 15

TOSH’S JOURNAL

September 15

“A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. “I have always been known to friends and foes to be the go-to-guy with respect to having a martini always near me. In all seriousness, “I know I’m drinking myself to a slow death, but then I’m in no hurry.” I have trouble sleeping at night, so I find having a chilled glass of martini at the bedside helps me sleep better. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I just reached the cooler, and take another sip, and I’m off to dreamland, where I try to imagine my life as a memoir. Which also keeps me up at nights, because I’m so damn busy remembering every little incident that went through my world from age 1 to 20. Youth is significant, but the memory of childhood is much more important. Luckily there have been substantial changes in the world of writing, one that “the biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.” With the miracle machine, the laptop, I don’t have to worry about that. Now I can write till my fingers run off to the side, where the martini glass resides.

My life changed when I found out that I’m a distant relative of Gilles de Rais, perhaps the first serial killer on record. The Frenchman was alleged to killing up to 600 children from 1432 to the spring of 1433. I personally don’t believe the number is that high, more likely 200. Nevertheless, being related to such a brute (although a refined one, according to historians) hasn’t helped me much. The dark cloud that follows me I think came from my distant relative. I try to think and behave like François de La Rochefoucauld, who seemed to be a reasonable gentleman of nobility. I bear that in mind while writing my memoirs and sipping my drink. He wrote that “true love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.” I had a dream the other night that I was on an island, and I came upon a sophisticated party, full of beautiful women - one of them looked like Louise Brooks. When I approached her, it was like I wasn’t there. She didn’t acknowledge me, and I had the feeling that either I wasn’t there, or she wasn’t there as well. The whole party appeared to be projected from someone’s dreams, but, to me, it wasn’t from my dream.

“There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.” So perhaps my dream the other night was my experience of falling in love, but the girl didn’t even exist. Can one love just an idea of being in love? The other part of the dream that I remember quite clearly is when I heard someone from the party saying “Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?” At that moment, I woke up and reached for my chilled martini.

The Evening Series: Monday, July 31, 2017

I’m pretty happy-go-lucky middle aged man till the evening comes rowing on toward the end of the daylight hours.  It is then, while drinking my first glass of wine, that my thoughts turn inward, expressing the dread that is very much not noticeable during the daylight hours.  Each sip I take brings me to a place that is more real than my mornings.  It is if I have been avoiding the surf, and finally, I can get on the wave, and let it ride me to a place that’s home.  Which by any terminology will be called despair. 

I spend most of the daylight hours at the Central Library here in Los Angeles.  I have been working on a novel about a writer who based his life on the presence of Robert Benchley.  Not being him exactly, but a character who approaches the sensibility of a Benchley in his life and writing.  When I show my novel-in-progress to others, they have all commented on Benchley - why and who?   I’m mostly interested in the “what” than the who or why of such commentary.  Benchley represents the humor of the world that is not funny.  I don’t see the joke during the daylight hours, but when in the home or at a bar nearby the library I often focus my thoughts on the world that exists in front of me, and how one can be funny inside that particular landscape.   It’s no joke, you know?

As the tick-tock of the moments go on, and I’m in front of my laptop, which has to be the most unromantic method to writing, I think of the family unit and what it means to a writer describing the moments as they pass.  Impossible to capture the fleeting thoughts as I drink more.  Truman Capote, a well-known lover of the sauce that takes one to other places, wrote that it is impossible to write when drunk.  Like his commentary that Kerouac wasn’t writing, just typing, he is clearly wrong.  As the cloud becomes thick with deep insight into a memory that comes and goes, like a humming refrigerator in the middle of the night that keeps one awake.  The thought comes back to the family and what that means to me, and therefore the world.  I come to a conclusion after looking at this page for an hour that the family could care less about the world. 

If you can see me now, one would notice a downturn frown on my face.  Happiness is now a distance, and as I look outside the darkness, it seems to me to be a portrait of yours truly.  Handsome yes, but sad as well.   My time spent in hell, which looks very much like heaven, is my prison. I made these four walls with additional space for windows all around me, and I have no one else to blame except yours truly.   I read Benchley to get insight and reflect on a time when social drinking was looked upon as an active series of steps to one’s betterment.  Now, I can see the false footsteps to that ladder to success.  It’s a myth or image supplied by my ego and taste.  I remember reading a quote by a wise older man.  He said:  “Look down at me, and you see a fool; look up at me, and you see a god; look straight at me, and you see yourself.”   Which proves that one should at first, be standing up than sitting down.   And second, never look at someone straight on.  It’s best to study that person perhaps behind their back. 

I will sit here, drink wine, till the bottle is empty.  Then I will go to bed.  I will dream. Everything will be fine and dandy in the morning.  Till the evening comes again (and again). 

THE SUNDAY SERIES: Sunday No. 1

Sunday No. 1

Quiet Sunday is a loud Sunday for me.  The quietness around the house just opens up the inner sounds of my body, and my thoughts appear to me as a forceful speaker.  I want to shut it off, but I can’t. So today I decided not to have my bottle of wine.  I drink a bottle every night.  Either with my wife or by myself.  I get buzzed, but I never get drunk.  Or is being buzzed being drunk?  The difference is if you were in front of me, you wouldn’t think I was drunk.  I never get too boisterous, or opinionated and really, a bottle of wine for me is a way to pass time.  Time is the enemy that takes so prisoners. 

Sunday is the first day of the week.  I’m often reflective on that day, where I think what happened the previous week, while thinking about the upcoming week.  I keep a calendar for the purpose of not forgetting to pay off bills, or if I have luncheon or dinner appointments.  My life is very quiet, and therefore my thoughts are ringing out proud and loud, as I try to make sense of my existence.   Around 7 PM, is when I open the bottle of wine.  The first sip to the last is an adventure that I travel within.  

The things I like to do when drinking wine is to read, watch TV, or having a meal.  The hard part I think of not drinking wine, is the eating part.  Food is good, but wine makes the food desirable.  I usually drink two glasses of wine with a typical meal.  I also like to have a glass of wine before the meal.  It’s the initial glass that I drink slowly, while I write or listen to music on my laptop.  It’s a meditative moment where I’m focused on the drinking as well as the writing or music on hand.  Drinking wine doesn’t make the conversation better, or makes the music more enticing - but it adds a certain texture to those two distinctive practices. 

If I have the option, I rather drink wine alone.  Which is odd, because wine traditionally is a drink that one shares with another.  The thing is I have so many things to think about, that’s all in my head, I rarely have a need to verbally express myself to another person.  Wine in a way is that other person that’s in my head.  I don’t need wine to be social, in fact, I can amuse or be interesting to someone else without the effects of alcohol as a partner-in-crime.   Wine doesn’t impress me, or anyone else, it is a friend that puts his or hers arm around your shoulders, as you think or notice the passing of time.   As of right now, I’m writing without my bottle of wine, which is uniquely weird!  I don’t feel I need to have it for me to write.  The thoughts come out OK, but I do like wine as an object that is located in front of me.  When I do drink wine with respect to writing, I always prefer white.  White wine (all categories) allows me to think without the thoughts getting muddy.  Red wine usually puts me to sleep or often I feel like I’m moving in slow motion.  Red is for sure good for noticing time and what it’s doing that moment.  I become extra-aware of the moments passing - where with white wine, it is more about speed, and getting lost in whatever is on-hand at the moment you are drinking. 

My favorite day of the week to drink wine is of course, Sunday.  Traditionally it’s 24 hours of reflection.  Many go out to walk around the reservoir, or maybe see an afternoon movie, but I prefer to sit in front of my stereo speakers with a bottle of wine opened in front of me, and just let the intoxication take me to another space or place.  I like playing vinyl albums, because you have to leave your seat, and flip the record on its other side.   If you just think about time, it is usually 20 minutes per side, so I know for at least that amount of time, I can just focus on what I’m hearing and listening to.  The music is often just a soundtrack to my thoughts as if it was a ship passing between two giant icebergs in the far Atlantic. 

It is very odd not to feel the effects of my favorite drink at this time of night.   The truth is I never feel fully sober.  Mostly due to the toxins of the world that I breathe in and out on a daily basis.  My perception when I walk outside is sometimes overwhelming, due to the noise of the traffic and the volume of the crowd in various shopping centers and malls.  I also have a hard time dealing with people directly, especially on the telephone.  The only place where I feel totally comfortable is within my head with the buzz of a bottle of wine.  

I’m very curious to find out what will happen if I don’t drink my bottle of wine tonight.  Will minutes ring loudly in my ears as time passes?   What I do know is - schedule is addictive.  I think it even goes beyond addiction to drugs, drink, or any other vice one can think of.   Writing is very much an addiction as well.  The calendar is addictive. There is nothing more comforting than looking at your calendar and seeing your life being mapped out by the hour.  Drinking at night is also a sense of comfort.  It is a process through which to remark on the passing of that day, and that the schedule will go on at the present and into the future.  In other words, addiction is living.  And right now, I’m living to the fullest.