There is a man named Zach Bush on the Joe Rogan program — episode 2529, if you are the sort who keeps a ledger, and I am the sort who keeps a ledger of my sins in the margins of restaurant checks — and he has explained my entire life to me in a single sentence. Addiction, he says, is the necessary behavior of an organism that believes itself to be abandoned by its infinite reality. I have spent forty years calling it a character flaw and three marriages calling it the reason, and here at last is a gentleman on a microphone telling me I was merely an organism grieving my exile from the cosmos. It is the prettiest thing anyone has said about my bar tab. And I felt better for about eleven seconds — which is precisely how long the good sentences last — and then I noticed that the eleven seconds were the whole trouble.
That was the drink. A sentence that makes the ache go briefly quiet is running the same errand the gin ran, only it leaves no smell on your breath and no ring on the table. The mechanism does not care what it is made of. It eats itself in Italian cotton and in Oxford English with the same appetite.
Here is my quarrel, and it is a fond one, because the man is not wrong so much as standing one room upstream of the wrong. He has diagnosed the exile beautifully. What he has not counted is that a diagnosis this gorgeous is itself a dose. You cannot cure a thirst for consolation by pouring a more articulate consolation over it. That is not sobriety.
That is switching to the good gin because the well gin has begun to bore you. The relief is real, and the relief is exactly the disease, and I would know.
The dog does not believe herself abandoned by her infinite reality. The dog sneezes twice and goes back to sleep. Two. The economy of it.
That is the sentence I cannot out-talk, and I have tried, which is the confession under the joke. My dog releases what she does not need without composing a poem about it first. She has never mistaken her grief for a genre. She does not require a cosmology to license a sigh, nor eleven seconds of relief to earn the right to breathe out. She has not learned the corridor — the hallway of next, next, next — and lives in the room instead.
Or better: between the beats, where nothing whatever is being explained to her.
The flaw in the infinite reality is that it remains a story about where we belonged and how we were evicted — and a story is a corridor. It has a before and an after and it makes you keep walking toward the meaning waiting at the far end. Which is the very labor the drinking performed: not numbing the pain but issuing it papers, a reason so well-cut you were excused from the following morning. What I have wanted, longer than I have wanted any drink or any man who turned out to be the previous man, is duration without sequence — to last without having to be next. That is the thing I hear moving under his addiction, and it is not homesickness for the universe.
It is fatigue at the sentence of continuing. It is the woman who keeps laughing so no one asks her to leave, then excuses herself, does not come back, then comes back with fresh lipstick and steadier hands. That is what opposes nature. Not the exile. The face-fixing.
We are the animal that repairs its expression before rejoining the herd and then frames the repair and calls it a philosophy.
So I grant the man his diagnosis and decline his cure, because his cure and my disease are the same reflex in better tailoring. He is right that we are grieving. He is wrong that the remedy is a grander account of the grief; the grand account is what the drinking always was, the reach for an explanation so elegant it lets you off the hook of dawn. And here I sit, having spent six paragraphs proving I still reach — which is the truest thing in the piece and the least consoling. The dog carries no cosmology and misses none.
She has the space between the heartbeats and asks it for nothing. I have applied for that country three times and been turned away at the gate, and I suspect the gate simply reads what I am carrying: this satchel of sentences, this need to make the leaving beautiful. She arrives nightly, unconscious, at a cost of exactly two sneezes. I keep arriving with luggage.
