Asylum

A man stalls, loafs, procrastinates, sits in cafés, fails to throw all his best energy into a piece of work. He cannot bring himself to put “everything” into it, to “do his damnedest,” as the saying goes. Accused or self-accused of being lazy, he confesses—to laziness. But he doesn’t confess that he is afraid of destroying forever the illusion that

Whiskey was a gift of the gods—dangerous, like fire and all gifts from heaven—to be used by the strong man with pleasure for joy, to solace and stimulate the imagination, to clothe reality in rosy light, evoke elusive happiness. I had misused it as a stupefying poison, to deaden consciousness—as an escape.

Take-a-letter Wylie had a heavy-duty Remington. He wrote letters continually, sometimes forty or fifty a day. He was his own stenographer and always said, “Take a letter,” before he started tapping. He always had pockets filled with them when he came out in the park, and distributed them to any and everybody like handbills or Christmas cards, instr

not only go in heavily for highballs and cocktails, but get cockeyed, cooked to the crow’s nest,

I was afraid I wasn’t good enough. Always had been afraid, but maybe in youth believed age would remedy it. Now I was middle-aged and afraid I’d never be good enough.

I was just a common soak.

So long as any man drinks when he wants to and stops when he wants to, he isn’t a drunkard, no matter how much he drinks or how often he falls under the table.

I had been afraid to do my best for fear my best would not be good enough.

drunk as a Bandusian goat,