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O<\/span>K… I guess it’s no surprise a lot of us theoretically creative types have… oh, let’s call them… mood issues.<\/span><\/p>\n Of course, we don’t all<\/span> go the Elliott Smith route and there are<\/span>, undoubtedly, some happy-go-lucky types who keep pouring out music and words (or other forms of art) and never once think about plunging a dagger into our own hearts.<\/p>\n Well… there must be.<\/p>\n But it ain’t me.<\/p>\n We all have ups and downs, of course. And, perhaps, it stands to reason that those who “live large” will have higher highs and lower lows. Not to mention more erratic cycles of up and down, longer, shorter… maybe a little like heart arrhythmia, I suppose: too fast, too slow, pounding, barely beating… that’s <\/span>what the emotional life of some of us is like.<\/p>\n A life of interesting times,<\/span> you might say.<\/p>\n Anyhow, I’m not bitching. Good grist for the kind of songs I write. (Or do I write the kind of songs I write because of… yeah, you think?<\/span>)<\/p>\n But it’s been a long and rocky journey, too. And, as those adept at reading between the lines have probably already sussed, after a few decades of alternating — and, not unoften, overlapping — periods of attempted monogamy and semi-wanton carousing, all of it well-lubricated by society’s drug-of-choice, alcohol, I have in recent years led, by comparison, an almost monastic life of relative seclusion and sobriety.<\/p>\n That might sound<\/span> like something healthy and mature — and, to be certain, I have, thank God, no desire to try to squeeze back inside the bottle that contained me for so many years. But alcohol did<\/span>, for me, have a leveling effect on my moods. It sort of mushed them together.<\/p>\n And, honest to God, for me, a good, nasty black out drunk and killer hangover seemed to have the same kind of salubrious effect claimed for electroshock therapy. You wake up, you can’t remember anything, you ache all over… but whatever it is you were obsessively worrying about is pretty well forgotten, just part of the smear of history. Past history.<\/p>\n That was the good part of drinking, for me.<\/p>\n The bad part was that what started out as an occasional blow-out became, over the years, a somewhat more subdued, but nightly, then daily routine. (Well, the two beers every morning before coffee counted for something<\/span>, yeah? After breakfast, I was good ’til cocktail hour… as long as that began about 5 or 6 pm and lasted until closing.) I had many adventures over the years with a bottle in one or both hands… but at the end I was just watching TV and sluggin back one Bud after another. The guy I swore<\/span>, when I was 19, that I would never<\/span> be.<\/p>\n But <\/span>no good deed ever goes forever unpunished… the receding tides of alcohol revealed a jagged and rocky emotional landscape I’ve found myself picking my way through, ever since.<\/p>\n It’s an interesting life, still.<\/p>\n\n