Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been fantastic. I can barely compose sentences. So this suggests (for me, anyway) that Drunken ______ is at an end. I am sloshed beyond compare and shall rest drunkenly. Allah’s speed.

8:50 PM: I am officially on Screwdriver Five (I think). I am also colliding iinto walls and it is heinously arduous for me to type in a fucking post. I hope for B’s sake that this isn’t considered “moderate.” It sure as hell doesn’t feel that way. My head is beginning to throb. In my defense, I should say that drinking copious amounts of alochol is no longer a reality for me. At least, it hasn’t been the case since my mid-twenties. So I’ve had to force the stuff down my gullet, with the caveat that I should last to some degree. I’m a man of my word, as some folks here know.

Anyway, fair is fair. And I’m happy to address Lauren’s point concerning “the end of the relationship.” From my standpoint, at least, the female anatomy has been of more pressing interest since the end of the relationship. The value of a relationship involves rampant sex and intimacy that stymies the male resolve to some degree. But when it boils down to a solitary existence, the male is prone to download porn and to drift his eyes towards the fantastic tits bundled beneath a tight and revealing upper garment. This is comparatively normal, I’d say, as males go. We really can’t help ourselves. It’s biological. But in our defense (or at least my defense), we are also interested in the brains behind the machine. Except that this concern is revealed later in the game. Surely, my explicitly stipulated “putty” clause from the post in question was clear enough. But if it wasn’t, let me be the first (if not the umpteenth) to suggest that males are inherently visual and that, ostensibly, there is nothing wrong with this. We love your anatomy. We love to take it home with us. But, as was the case with this afternoon’s “let’s swap the material objects we left in each other’s apartments” meetings with my ex-gf, we males, I suspect, take the end of a relationship harder than the female hoping to become steadfast friends at the drop of a hat. It bothers us to enter some domicile in which we were previously intimate, precisely because we are inherently visual procrastinators.

Does this sort of answer your question, Lauren? If not, please advise and, as the drinks continue to pour down my larynx, I’d be happy to clarify. Kiss kiss.

I’m very impressed with Richard Powers’ The Time of Our Singing. He is concerned with virtue in wholly unanticipated ways. Whereas, I want to beat the hell out of Tom Wolfe’s cartoonish depiction of humanity in I Am Charlotte Simmons. I’ll have more to say on the latter, probably at January. But for the moment, I ask what’s worse? Deluding yourself into Balazc/Zola realism or coming to terms with your own intellectual limitations and taking a few risks. For my money, Richard Powers kicks Tom Wolfe’s ass any day of the week.

[UPDATE: Chance Morrison is also participating. Woo!]

It occurs to me that I should probably be drunker. I should point out that, despite several screwdrivers, whiskeys and Pilsners, I am still unfortunately coherent. I’m doing the best that I can. But there is this thing called an evening in which one must endure.

Even so, I suspect that National Drunken Writer Night, to most people, involves keeping on the safe ‘n sane. The question here is whether you want endurance or the immediate cum shot. If desirable, please advise in the comments as to how you’d like me to proceed with drink.

[Note: I should point out that typing is becoming harder. So perhaps I’ve fulfilled some of the dicta behind this exercise. B will know for sure. But if there are any independent judges, please fire away. Also check out Gwenda, who is doing a more remarkable job than I am at this. She, alas, has an understanding husband, whereas I have the remarkable savior of Kazaa Lite-downloaded pornography. The porn, I should point out, is disappointing and hardly as valuable as, oh say, a significant other. I doubt my capacity to go into the world on the prowl, but stranger things have happened. You want interactive? This is it, baby!]

How many Gordon Comstock’s are there out amongst us? I speak, of course, of the protagonist in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Comstock was an ad man who willingly ostracized himself from his heinous profession with the idea of being a poet pursuing truth, as opposed to sticking as an ad man. Circumstances eventually brought Comstock back into the advertising fold. But I evoke Comstock because, as I was shamefully trying to light up a cigarette (a habit that, regrettably, comes with drink), I was recently recognized on the streets by a neighbor. The neighbor introduced me to a friend of his and then proceeded to roundly mock me for producing a “highly literate play” called Something an Alligator written by a guy that’s “read too much.”

The neighbor, I should point out, had criticized me for daring to make the next play “more accessible.” I replied at the time, What’s wrong with this? I was a guy who dared to challenge an audience and learned from the results. Bombard the audience with too much and they will draw blood. Thus, behavior should be crystal-clear. Hence, my current research efforts to make the next play right.

So this neighbor, who collects books and moonlights as a sedentary book collector, hopes to draw my blood. But he makes me think of Comstock because, like Comstock, I’ve remained idealistic, but, unlike Comstock, I’ve learned from my results. And I’m determined to presevere just to spite the bastards.

How you like them apples?

In San Francisco (at least), there is sympathy for the parallel parker. Even when the vehicle appears to have been owned for some time, San Franciscans will dutifully instruct a parallel parker who just doesn’t have the shit to get his/her vehicle thoroughly ensconced in one of our rare parking spaces. I just got back from talking with folks outside of a neighborhood dive. The empathy was commensurate with, perhaps, a child unable to find the proper sexual configurations within a Barbie Dream House. We were all there, encouraging the driver to make a hard left and a hard right, and get her remarkably sized vehicle into a spot that was, I’m sad to say, capacious enough for two vehicles.

But she did it. With our guidance. She was able to squeeze her SUV into her spot because we challenged her to apply extra drive. Perhaps there is a chapter in the book, The Wisdom of Crowds, which covers this. Needless to say, the aforementioned SUV was still far from the curb — but not as far as the small vehicle inhabiting the space in front of it.

This is what community is all about.

[In other news, Gwenda’s got a mean piece about clowns. Bless our loyal originator. But where the hell is Sarvas?]

6:46 PM: The truth is I didn’t expect to be smashed so early. Something about vodka does this to a man. I feel as if I should be wearing a babushka or at the very least dancing a Russian jig. The sky is dark and this, of course, creates the illusion that it is somehow night when it is, in fact, barely early evening. So it goes.

I should perhaps put in some words of wisdom about how the male perceives women after the end of a relationship (no stranger here, given that it went down recently for me). The truth is that males are despicably obvious when it comes to fawning over the almighty female anatomy (which is quite sublime, I assure you). And this affliction only worsens as one gets older. Speaking for myself at least, I find that I am more of a perverted bastard at 30 than I ever was at 25. I love women in all of their manifold forms, and I would, of course, be happy to bang and love each and every one of them. It is not equal opportunity that motivates these interests, but a je ne sais quo obsession for women in all of their manifold and beautiful forms. They are all good, really, if men would only give them the chance. (And I certainly do.) Or at least take stock in the human heart.

Men, of course, won’t confess this. Because, for whatever reason, they consider it a matter of pride over who they lust after. Never mind that their fantasies are completely incompatible with reality and that, in the end, they would sooner fuck a hairless pig than cop to an unsuccessful Saturday night. In this way, men remain barbarians and it is truly a tragic affair. But, in fact, reality offers some considerable surprises when one rides on impulse.

He figured what the hell. It was time to set fire to the library. The books had taunted him, yes. But the cruel overdue fees had disturbed him more. Those ruthless librarians, which he had found sexy since his first erection, had let him down. There was no way he’d be able to finish all the books. Every branch that had been set up had been designed to completely diminish his hopes for remaining a smart, erudite young thing. At the age of 19, he had hoped that he’d be some majestic galvanizer. Some hot young stallion who could quote Baudelaire while pounding into some blitzed naif and giving her the orgasm of her life. Better yet, maybe his super smarts would be commissioned to ransack some jaded hack working for a lesser New York paper. Starfucking his way to a blurb on the latest Nora Roberts or, at the very least, servicing one of those beautiful fortysomething career women that turned his insides into sweet lime Jello. They were underrated, those super-sharp slightly older ladies. And even if they were facing an unfair race on the gender circuit, particularly in light of the November election and its consequences, he appreciated them.

It was a base existence, and he had managed many rolls in the hay. The time had come to take his convictions to the next level. To indeed invoke an act that was wholly irrational and really had no explanation to anyone outside of his arrogant shell.

So he pulled out his dogeared copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook and flipped through for a recipe for a Molotov cocktail. Unfortunately, no one had informed him that The Anarchist’s Cookbook wasn’t nearly as accurate as the black helicopter wags thought it was. But that didn’t matter. Because he was a very clumsy mofo and he often conducted these experiments naked. To say the least, this was a colossal mistake for a clumsy person to make. So while in the process of shaking and stirring the goods, he dropped the lit match upon his crotch. It was an accident. But then so many aspects of his life had been accidents. The big questions was whether he’d learn to adapt to this most recent contretemps.

His pubic hair lit into a glorious conflagration. He yelped and he hollered and he tried to put it out. But the fire spread down his legs. It should be noted that he was a hairy guy. He had so much hair on his body that it was really a matter of a few years before he anonymously went into a laser hair removal clinic and finally calibrated the appropriate hair-to-flesh ratio to an acceptable level for the mighty brains who wished to hump him.

But since there was a major strand of hair (a fey form of kindling, as it were) connecting his pubic regions to his legs, it was (so the pundits remarked in the next day’s newspapers) only a matter of time. Soon his entire nether regions and his legs were being lapped by majestic flames. Unfortunately, he was alone. Which meant, of course, that no one was around to capture this exciting moment on video.

So he decided to run naked in the streets. The excitement got several strangers’ attention. And he was whsked by an ambulance to a hospital. He spent the next six years paying off the bills.

The unfortunate consequence was that the journalists refused to fuck him as frequently as they once did. The scars of second-degree burns, alas, didn’t have quite the same sex appeal as a wonderfully unwrinkled youth revealing his nakedness to a woman of note.

But if there was a positive aspect to this tale, he soon developed the greatest respect for libraries. And he was able to encourage several young twentysomethings hoping to land a lay that books were far sexier than those hot op-ed mommas who weren’t nearly as populist-minded in social surroundings as they claimed to be in their columns.

3:41 PM: Fuck it. I’ve started screwdriver one. Eastern time counts, doesn’t it? The screwdriver, I should point out, is about as close you can get to that perilous threshold between straight shots of absinthe (name your testosterone-charged elixir of choice) and the decidedly unmanly category of girlie drink (mai tais, pretty much anything having to do with fruit, and of course the classy manhattan) while retaining some semblance of manhood. Or, even better, I walk the wild gender-neutral line between. Take that, eleven states! I’m almost willing to change my sexual orientation just to spite the bastards. But, of course, I’ve never found the penis, the gym-toned ass, or the male developed chest even remotely sexy. More my fault than anything else. Plus, women are just too damned sexy. They have the curves and fabulous anatomy that, if we were less civilied, we would rip endless bodices over. Smooth legs, their wonderful smell, breasts, even their shoulders and noses are fantastic. And if they’re smart, acerbic and take no prisoners, I am nothing more than putty.

Archive’s “Fuck U” plays in the background. Suitable.

I fear that tonight’s drinking (and writing) will put me in an aggro mood. So be it. Rather than attempt the impossible (namely, applying some Photoshopped graphic of reference with each entry), I’ve decided to simply number the fuckers and apply the usual e.e. cummings/livejournal crap.

Drink up, America! You’re fucked (well, at least temprarily).

(UPDATE: Holy hell, is Gwenda in on this? Too fucking cool.)