Nobody Has All the Answers / L. Rust Hills

Nobody Has All the Answers

While L. Rust Hills is remarkably right about many things, he also recognizes the limits of useful advice. So rather than call an essay “How to Stop Smoking and Drinking,” he called it “ How to Cut Down on Smoking and Drinking Quite So Much.” I excerpt it here. It appears in the section “ How to Do Some Particular Things Particularly”—not, we note, in “ How to Be Good.”


I had one hell of a system once for cutting down on drinking so much. I was sharing a big summer house with a lot of city people, and I came to realize I’d been getting bombed every night. I was there all the time; the others would come up just weekends, or on their vacations. Anyway, I devised this incredibly clever system: the idea was I’d plan ahead just exactly what I would do drinking-wise for each and every day of a four-day cycle. On what became knows as A First Day, I wouldn’t drink at all—nothing, not a single drink. This was to prove I wasn’t an alcoholic and could do without it. On the next day, A Second Day, I would have one drink before dinner and one drink after dinner—that’s all, no more, no matter how often they told me I was a no-fun person. This was to prove I could drink abstemiously, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. On A Third Day, I’d allow myself to drink what I called “moderately.” This was to prove I could drink moderately. And on A Fourth Day, it was all-out, anything goes as much as I wanted. This was to prove I was still a fun person. Then it would be A First Day again. And so on.
Well, the system really did sort of work for awhile, but there were difficulties with it, as I guess you must have imagined there would be. On a First Day, after A Fourth Day debauch, is of course just when you need a drink most, at least one drink, if not just one drink before dinner then at least one drink just before bed. On A First Day I’d be irascible all day and go to bed early and not be able to sleep. A Second Day was all right, nothing to get excited about, but the way sensible people live regularly, I guess. A Third Day was always a problem, because my idea of “moderately” kept changing as the evening wore on. A Fourth Day, of course, was just the normal disaster.
One of the main problems of the system was the four-day cycle when everyone else was more or less on a seven-day week. I can’t for the life of me now remember how I decided on four days or why on earth I didn’t change when I saw it wasn’t working. If my Fourth Day were to come say on the other’s Tuesday, there wouldn’t be anyone to drink with me; it was awful having A Fourth Day go to waste like that. Then others couldn’t keep track of what day mine was. They’d prolong the cocktail hour unconscionably on A Second Day that happened to be their Friday night. Or I’d be moderately having a couple of drinks on A Third Day, maybe weaving a little as I told a long-winded story, maybe making myself one more at the same time, and I’d overhear one of the householders ask another, “Say, is this A Fourth Day, or what?”
Toward the end, I began switching my days around to accommodate, like a good householder, so my good days would coincide with their good days. Thus on A Second Day Saturday night, I’d decide during cocktails to have my Second Day tomorrow and my Third Day today; then later in the evening I’d decide to make today my Fourth Day and have my Third Day tomorrow and have my Second Day after that. But things tended to get confused, and of course the First And Second Days got kind of lost, and pretty soon every day was A Fourth Day again. It’s really hard to organize systems when you’re sharing with others.

PS, I have no idea what has become of L. Rust Hills, I hope he is well.

Note to myself: Wednesday, Nov 8th is my: “A Fourth Day"
Note to myself #2 : Promote Establishment of a National Holiday in November for inventor of “Mute” button on remote controls.

Sent to Ben's Bits: www.thehousingbubbleblog.com on Sunday, Nov. 5th 2006
Ben,
Forgive the intrusion prior to the Election’s on Tuesday. I found this news clipping in an old shoebox buried in the garage last week, one of the few remaining scraps left behind when my complete library was lost in the great fire of April 1993. I’ve deposited it here in the “Ben’s Bits,” as you haven’t created a category dedicated solely to humor, of course an alternate useful humor title might be the one supplied by Txchick57’s: “20lb Trout”

This is for All you bloggers here on Ben’s site that have made me laugh and really enjoy the time I spend reading and learning from your post’s. Thanks for sharing, you’re a wonderful gang! It’s Sunday Morning, we have a National Election just two days away, and as the title says: “Nobody Has All the Answers”
Timothy