The Shadow of Moroni, Part I · 6 January 2008

The other night I exited the 10 Freeway at Overland and drove north all the way to Wilshire under the shadow of Moroni. I considered the prophet’s anger.

Overland goes from thoroughfare to commercial zone to quiet residential, with the gilded Moroni on a spire, on a huge square pedestal many stories up and gleaming in floodlights, just staring you down the whole way, as you approach from the bottom of his long slow hill. I felt pretty well shaken by his gaze from up there on the Los Angeles Mormon temple: retribution for the horrible little gift I left there at the temple gates one night in 2003.

Get away from Moroni! Seriously, you might want to stop reading now.

What I left at the gates, there at the perfect perpendicular intersection of Wilshire and Overland at the bottom of the Temple Hill, was—not that I remember the leaving it—a little pile of vomit.

Worse—so much worse: I left the exact same gift a half mile west, at the gates of an even more tragic institution. The Los Angeles VA Hospital. The reason you should have stopped reading is you don’t want to know… that the VA never cleaned it up and neither did I. I drove Ohio back and forth to school for a week, like a dog that returns and returns and returns, as the little alcohol-laced pile sat there and rotted.

So horrible, to disgrace the maimed like that. Who wouldn’t stop in her tracks after that?

I had blacked out an hour before the vomit vandalism, late at a party celebrating a dear friend’s joining the Bristol professorate. We started with a rich pinot and went on to good whiskey, but what killed me was the Transylvanian plum wine brought by a Serbian who is obsessed with saving people from themselves. Is that what Sasha was doing with me out by the pool—making me face myself down, down the neck of a bottle—right before I started revealing departmental secrets to the little crowd? Is that—a self-reflection—what I was gazing into well into morning as The Editor held my hair in the bathroom?

As if I remember. Learning all I had revealed and disgraced was a good shake the next morning, because usually the blackouts didn’t end in overshare or sickness like that. But blackouts were common.

I was a good enough drinker—having begun at 14 at cornfield keggers in a state where there is nothing else to do outside the back seat of a car—that I could ingest large amounts and appear to be in control physically and conversationally. In college the philosophy boys liked that I could drink them under the table. But the truth was that my memory would usually go blank by midnight. My friends were numerous and true, so the blacking out was, when we reckoned it out the next morning, regarded as amusing if not a little sweet.

I had a way of drinking in high school that was as immature as any Montana teenager’s; and my college way of drinking was not much different except that it was luckily more rare because I worked late most weekends. By the time I was 22, I still had the free-for-all, go-for-drunk relationship to alcohol that you would expect to see in a teen using it aggressively to celebrate--to create--her freedom.

The morning after Moroni, lying destroyed on the sofa, I tried to remember how many blacked-out nights there had really been over the years. I tried to look at the compulsion that took me to that place over and over again. The edge where I took advantage of the loss of inhibition not to feel a buzz… but to drive on for more and more.

It was sort of horrible going through that stuff I had never examined; and then I ran into the memory—or non-memory—of leaving a kegger one night the winter I was 15….

(More in a day or two.)

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: evolution , having a body , self-deception

Comment

1. “The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom…for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.” – William Blake

   Sending you a hug. : )

   Posted by: Anna · Jan 7, 06:24 AM · #

2. I am in part compelled to offer a parallel story, or partial story, but, I’m afraid, not in public :)

   Posted by: patrick · Jan 7, 06:38 AM · #

3. I’m blessed with a low tolerance for alcohol, so I’m a cheap date but always in danger of over-imbibing. usually happens once or twice a year, to my wife’s chagrin.

   In the spririt of the middle path, moderate drinking seems a better choice than too much or none at all!

   :)

   Posted by: cody · Jan 7, 10:39 AM · #

4. I tried binge drinking for a while but always fell on my face prior to blacking-out level. By the time I turned 21, I’d already given up drinking any more than would give me a light buzz.

   You can’t know what moderation is until you experienced both extremes.

   Posted by: Carl · Jan 7, 12:59 PM · #

5. The angel Moroni!

   Posted by: eor · Jan 7, 01:22 PM · #

6. I know why you like him:

   Masonic Moroni

   Me too.

   Interesting thoughts, all, on the relationship of excess and spiritual practice. On which more later….

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 7, 03:33 PM · #

7. So many similarities….

   Posted by: Susan · Jan 7, 05:02 PM · #

8. What a combo! If I were a 32nd Degree Mason and could bind in Marichyasana D I wouldn’t have to worry about Advaita Vedanta so much.

   Posted by: eor · Jan 7, 08:09 PM · #

9. My four (total) blackout stories you’ll hear sometime if you haven’t, the better and worse both. Somehow throwing up on both Moroni and the VA is poetic enough to warrant disclosures.

   But in the meantime, a note: that was your editor you drank under said metaphorical table, not me. Dubious point of pride (DPP) #76.

   Posted by: dailymiltonian · Jan 8, 12:57 PM · #

10. I know. I sort of had to disclose it even though it is disgusting. You’ve only four BOs? I don’t think I know any of those stories yet.

    As for under the table, you’re right. That first night at Black Butte Ranch? All I remember is that I was definitely under the table and you were not.

    DPP #1076, check.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 8, 01:11 PM · #

11. So about the middle path.

    Is shamanism a middle path? Is ashtanga yoga? Yeah right.

    It’s a demanding practice. “If it hurts you’re doing it wrong.” But also, in a different sense, initially:

    If it doesn’t hurt, you’re doing it wrong.

    Can I say that?

    Even if ultimately we’d like this practice to be consistent with “householding,” if you give yourself to the method, the first several years at least are anything but moderate. I don’t know that “moderate ashtanga” is a great idea at all… why do halfway transformation?

    That said, my eating meat in November (of course salmon is meat) and drinking in December were all about messing with my edges. I’ll write a little more about that. I wanted to mess with my own habits to see if they were just unnecessary mental hangups. I don’t have any answers, but will say more in the next posts.

    For now, as much as I like the idea of the middle path, I wouldn’t apply it to an intoxicant. Hello, self-deception. Just a moderate amount of hard porn. Just a moderate amount of beating people up. Just a moderate amount of blow. Similar logic as just a moderate amount of alcohol.

    So for me the language of the middle path does not illuminate this subject. Drinking moderately feels great even though it turns out I still would prefer to drink IMmoderately. If I do it moderately, it’ll be because I find it pleasurable more than because I’m pretending that it’s integral to “practice.” Practice in some cases may be just the same with it or without it (and in other cases totally hampered by it, I hate to say): depends on the practice and the person. But in the meantime, for me sheer pleasure is a good reason to do something too.

    Can I say that?

    Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 8, 01:47 PM · #

12. Not sure if it helps, but the precepts as taken by Kwan Um zennists include refraining from intoxicants “taken to induce heedlessness.” I find that an interesting parameter.

    Posted by: karen · Jan 8, 03:21 PM · #

13. Too bad back in the day that did not include kim chee.

    Posted by: eor · Jan 8, 03:23 PM · #

14. Karen, you mentioned this a few months ago, yes.

    It seems, upon recent experimentation, that my interest in intoxicants is nothing more and nothing less than the inducement of heedlessness….

    Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 8, 05:35 PM · #

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