I mentioned in passing in my last post about how "subconscious mental blocks in my vocabulary dissolve after a few whiskey and cokes." I suppose I should I explain that.
I grew up in a tiny town that was, to put it politely, anti-intellectual. A more succinct phrase might be "aggressively ignorant." In the school I attended from kindergarten to 12th grade (all in one building, I might add) there was a pervasive atmosphere of "I will only do as much as I need to do to get by."
Personal expression--quashed.
Creativity--quashed.
Anything that didn't involve tractors, beer, or pot--quashed.
It was even considered effeminate for guys to join the choir. However, that this was not the fault of the teaching staff. I did, and still do, have a great deal of respect for anyone in the teaching profession. I hope to be a teacher myself some day. The student body had a character all its own that they could do nothing to change.
Anyway, I'm trying to set the stage for the rest of this story. I hope you have some inkling of how intellectually repressive my hometown was.
When I was in elementary school, I did everything I could to prove to everyone just how much smarter I was than they were. While everyone else was reading 100-page novels for class, I read 1000-page epics on my own. I excelled at everything academic I laid my hands on, and I rubbed it in everyone's face--This is how much smarter I am than you. This is how much better I am than you.
As you may have guessed, this behavior never won me any friends. Quite the opposite: most of my childhood was very, very lonely. It wasn't uncommon for entire summer vacations to go by without me doing anything with someone my age. I never made any real friends until high school.
Somewhere around middle school age, I finally realized that my behavior was insulting to others, and that they didn't want to be my friend because of the way I behaved towards them. How did this escape me for so long? To this day I believe that I am to some extent, socially retarded. (You'll excuse the connotations of the word "retarded." I mean it in its denotative sense.) I suppose you could call it a mild case of Asperger's syndrome. I simply didn't understand the rules of social interaction. In a lot of ways, I still don't.
When this finally dawned on me, I did everything I could to hide my intellect. Like every adolescent, I just wanted to fit in. To be one of the crowd. To be liked.
If there's a moment that sums this up better than any other, it's this: I was in the school library with two classmates. I don't remember the context, but I do remember saying something similar to:
"Oh, man, I thought he was going to have an aneurysm!"
To a pair of blank, hostile stares.
"...it's like a heart attack." I muttered apologetically. Aneurysms aren't like heart attacks, obviously, but the point is that I was attempting to once again show off my brilliance by using a big word. I'm absolutely certain that my classmates didn't know the definition of aneurysm, much less that I was wrong.
"Then why didn't you just say heart attack?" One classmate replied, contemptuously.
I have no idea what I said next, but I can say for certain that I was abashed and humiliated. From that point on, I did my best to muzzle myself and only use words that I knew virtually everyone would understand.
Sadly, it's been so long since I began doing this that it's no longer a conscious decision to restrict myself. The only time I feel I fully express myself is after I've had a few drinks. The subconscious filter I've placed upon myself is apparently alcohol soluble... it dissolves in the booze flowing through my blood, leaving me able to write and speak without the impositions of a restricted vocabulary.
I firmly believe that all of the best writing I've ever done has been done in the interim between the first sip of booze and the brink of drunken incoherency. When I wrote about my fight at Turner Hall (an entry now lost to history, fuck-you-very-much Diary-X.com) I made a point of drinking while I was writing. I knew that my description would be a pale, ineffective shadow of the events unless I drank as I wrote.
The words, quite simply, flowed halfway into my first Canadian Club and Coke. It was some of the best writing I ever did, and I was damn proud of it. I was deeply hurt when it was lost along with my original blog.
I can feel bits of my original speech seeping back into me as the years go by. I hope eventually I'll be able to use sober what I can now only access while drinking.
