To be an artist is to suffer. While my suffering may resemble what in others could be deemed “a drinking problem” and “the reason we aren’t allowed back at the Applebee’s on Lancaster,” it is in fact the burden of greatness which I must bear and which will always escape your limited and meek understanding.
I am but a humble writer, a scribe of the soul, whose artistic vitality derives most fervently from that enticing she-demon, the imbibable spirit. I am not, per your sophisticated phrasing, “just a lazy fucking asshole who blew all the rent money on Stella Artois and Johnnie Walker.”
My literary works are my belabored gift to my fellow man, my humble submission to the great library of profundity: Hemingway, Bukowski, Camus, and me. I didn’t ask to be a conduit for the same cosmic energy that drove these men to maudlin genius, but after twelve to sixteen IPAs it becomes unquestionably clear: I was meant to take up the mantle in this long line of artificers, and also Plus I’m a better driver when I’m smashed because I pay even closer attention.
Each day I endeavor to fulfill my duty-bound sacrifice when I alight to enshrine the universal truths of man: that suffering is inevitable; that life is a constant negotiation between the will to live and the desire to lay down and cease; that in a pinch a good long pull off the Listerine bottle will keep the creative juices flowing.
You say I ruined your mom’s Christmas party; I say no one perceives the reality of our Sisyphean, capitalistic desperation as clearly as I do (from underneath her antique buffet in a puddle of piss and blood).
A hangover is just an interstitial chapter wherein I explore the limits of inner and outer pain. Man’s capacity for turmoil is a bottomless well from which we leech endless, sloshing buckets of liquid suffering, and sometimes there are little chunks of food I don’t even remember eating in it.
My expansive oeuvre represents the coalescence of a lifetime of meditation on the theme of existence; of years of sacrifice I have made by drinking from the moment I awaken to the moment I pass out in whatever bush or public fountain I happen to be near; of one man’s stumbling journey into the urine-soaked, Odyssean inferno of hell in pursuit of art; and the fact that I have self-published all twenty-nine of my novels using Shutterfly is only a further testament to the universal singularity of the sacrifices I have lovingly made for my fellow man. Although I hope to god a publisher will call me back because my doctor says I need a liver transplant if I’m going to continue my aesthetic pursuits or, as she calls it, “guzzling liquor like a frat pledge on rumspringa.”