Proof that God Loves Us and Wants Us to Be Happy

Here are some things that have made me think, "I should get drunk immediately" in the last couple of months:

1) the Buffalo Bills win

2) the Buffalo Bills lose

3) the people on The Office seem too sad

4) the people on the Office seem too happy

5) Lord of the Rings seems too long

6) anything at all about the movie The Last Waltz

7) my parents

8) everyone at my workplace

So there is a sampling, undoubtedly not totally representative -- I have thought "I should get drunk immediately" way more than eight times in the last few months -- but a sampling that correctly and conspicuously fails to mention books. Which is a shocker, because most lists I make that have to do with anything at all end up being pretty book-intensive. However, most books that have to do with drinking end up either being cautionary -- don't get as drunk as these protagonists! -- and there has never been, say, the book equivalent of the Last Waltz.

Rick Moody wrote an essay on celestial music that is included in the Best American Essays 2008, which I have been reading at coffeeshops the last few days, and one of the things he mentions therein is that in heaven, they need no intoxicants. "In heaven," he says, "you have not fallen short, you are not in a condition of wanting, you are theoretically happy, and so you are not looking for the music or drugs or spirits to intoxicate you in any way." I think that, in books, we need no intoxicants either. To me, alcohol represents the victory of not-knowing over knowing: he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. Reading is the opposite, then, of intoxication: he who makes a reader of himself delays the pain of being a beast. To me, working through a piece of literature is the opposite -- but, I have to add, the equal -- of working through a bottle of gin: one puts me up higher, in a position to judge without caring, and the other puts me where I don't want to do anything but listen to Hall and Oates, in a position of caring without judging. Those two activities, I should note (judging w/o caring and vice versa) are not necessarily opposed, though: both reading (All Shall Be Well, and All Shall Be Well, and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well) and drinking (Michelob Ultra) have reminded me to remind my father that I love him. However, I only mentioned that after reading the book; after drinking all that Mich Ultra, all I did was start jabbering at him about progressive income tax and socialized health insurance. That is what I get for having, as the one book I like to read when drunk, Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal in my liquor cabinet. So I guess in the last analysis, as usual, books beats booze by a narrow margin.