the recent new year's er... festivities are still fresh in my head, which has got me thinking about one of my pet lit crit theories again. my proposition is that the most literary drug is alcohol, based off my observation that it is really hard to sift through the wikipedia articles of acclaimed writers without constantly tripping over the word "alcoholism"the second most literary drug, in my opinion, is opium. see, for example, de quincey or coleridge. it is really unfortunate that opium has been completely supplanted by its upstart, far too potent descendants. the dream of sitting back on a winter night in a big comfy easy chair beside the roaring fireplace and sipping some opium tea before bed is dead.. maybe this is just because of the sorts of books i read, after all i started my literary journey many years ago with infinite jest, basically half of which is about rehab/alchoholics anonymous and almost certainly based on personal experience.

i've shopped this theory around several times, unfortunately not really to anybody who's done as much reading as i have. one stoner of course countered with cannabis, a proposal i felt was laughable when i considered the creative outputs (or frankly any outputs) of the stoners i've known. mostly their knowledge and abilities begin and end with encylopedic knowledge of maurijuana strains and products, along with a series of increasingly byzantine procedures for consuming them in the highest dosages possible. anyways, as an example, this stoner offered up jack kerouac who apparently spoke fondly of smoking weed in his most well-known work on the road. i'd heard of kerouac but i wasn't really familiar with him or his work, so i moseyed down to wikipedia to see if this claim held up. and what should i find in the last paragraph of the introduction but this sentence: "In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking." case closed: kerouac was not a stoner, he was an alcoholic who dabbled in ganja on the side. in fact i had just gained a new alcoholic writer to support my theory.

i also submitted my theory to one of my far-better-read friends, although to be fair he probably takes too many book recommendations from me to be an unbiased source. he is a big stephen king guy, so he floated cocaine as a possibility. king famously spent most of the eighties on an extended cocaine bender, during which he wrote many of his most popular books, some of which he doesn't even remember writing. i heard an apocryphal story one time about king reading a book one time and feeling the oddest sense of deja vu, then turning to look at the title page to see if he had already read it only to discover that he had written the book. at the time i refuted my friend's claim by declaring that stephen king writes genre fiction not literature (which escalated into a wonderful argument), but i did some more research just now and it would seem that king originally took up cocaine to try and quit drinking, then ended up doing both in copious amounts during his decade-long bender. another win for team alcohol? at the very least it's seeming like a common denominator.

anyways, last night i sat down with a glass of wine to watch some bocchi the rock!. i was thinking about getting another glass once i finished it off but then i watched episode 6, in which bocchi encounters an alcoholic bass guitarist on the street. she tries to explain it but bocchi only feels pity. then she says bocchi looks like the type who would get really into alcohol. it occured to me that they do make a drug for social anxiety, it's called alcohol. but the scene that follows in which bocchi imagines her potential "drowning in alcohol" future is just her alone in her room amidst hundreds of empty strong zero cans. i did not get another glass of wine afterwards.