Everyone should have a creative
outlet. There are those who play
music. There are others who scrap
book. There are some people who can
truly work miracles with a rudimentary set of tools and a few pieces of
wood. Others strive to craft the perfect
game of bowling, achieve an elusive hole-in-one or seek to experience the
ultimate adrenaline climax through high-octane, death-defying pursuits such as
sky diving or Jello wrestling. As for
myself, I tend to enjoy propelling my blood alcohol level up past my IQ and
then use a keyboard to bare my soul before the anonymous masses of the Cyberian
Under Culture. (Actually, that may be a bit of an exaggeration. After taking a quick look at the site traffic
meter to this blog, I am pretty much only talking to you.)
Anyway,
I like to write. I’ve been writing for
years. There was actually a period in my
life several years ago where I regularly contributed to a (now defunct) comedy
website and I occasionally even got paid for it. Now admittedly, I was not published often,
mainly due to the fact that you would be surprised by how miniscule the market
is for long, graphic, explicitly epic anecdotes detailing explosive bouts of
food poisoning set amongst the exotic red light districts of the Far East. I have never even attempted to submit the
bulk of my work for publication and eventually just stopped writing altogether.
Recently
however, I was approached to write a small article for DDEAF, a local magazine
catering to the Detroit area fashion scene.
It was not a very big article, but it was fun and to be honest, it kind
of reignited my desire to start indulging my bardic tendencies once more. The editor seemed to like what I did and
requested another piece for their summer issue.
Excited to get started writing again, I set myself down in front of my
monitor, blew the dust off of my keyboard, placed my fingers in the starting
position and…immediately careened head-on into a debilitating case of writer’s
block. The problem is that I know
virtually nothing about fashion, as anybody who as ever seen me dress myself
will enthusiastically attest to. No, if
you want mildly amusing semi-biographical anecdotes about an ill-advised drunken
tour of some of the seedier back alleys of Thailand’s Pattaya Beach on the back
of an elephant, I’m your guy. If you
really need 1500 words authoritatively critiquing the Armani spring collection,
a half page written on men’s hair care tips or even a list of 5 effective
methods of birth control, it would probably be in your best interest to look
into hiring someone else. Not that I am
above trying to wing it for a check that I could put towards my bar tab at one
of my neighborhood watering holes.
Ultimately
though, if I want to be writer, especially a paid writer, I need to write.
And I need to write religiously.
Which brings me to this: The
Libertine Manifesto. Now, I am currently
writing two books. One has the working
title The Damned of St Andrews and is
a semi-autobiographical account of my efforts to break into a punk concert at
Detroit’s St. Andrews Hall in the early 1980’s.
The other is a novel about a man who finds himself in New Orleans in the
midst of a midlife crisis who unwittingly proves instrumental in founding a
cult-like social movement. The bulk of
my efforts on writing these two pieces consist of my sitting motionless at my
desk, staring at a blank page on my monitor and trying to force the words of
these novels out of my mind to rush maniacally towards my fingertips. Basically, my cold starts are proving
ineffective and I have decided I need to warm up a bit, hence my re-entry into
blogging with The Libertine Manifesto.
Now
the concept of the Libertine Manifesto is actually a couple of decades old,
born in the Kowloon District of Hong Kong during a particularly vicious bender
with a group of expatriate South Africans whose names I have long since
forgotten. We were reveling in our
rather unrepentant hedonistic tendencies and wishing there was some sort of
school for free spirited souls wishing to gloriously misspend their youths
pursuing misadventures abroad seeking the wanton indulgence of intoxicants,
adrenaline and wild monkey lovin’. Cognizant that a brick and mortar institution promoting
depraved excess was probably not feasible, I thought that coming up with a sort
of instructional manual for the aspiring alcoholic might be doable and I tried
to craft a rough draft with paper and pencil that I named The Third World Inebriate.
This eventually morphed into an article published on Zug.com about a
decade ago.
My
career in misbehavior on a global scale came to an end soon afterward as
well. At the time Third World Inebriate was published, my third child was born and my
priorities shifted. It was time for me
to declare a truce in my one man war against lucidity and shift my focus onto
doing whatever I could to ensure my children grew up with the proper tools
required to embrace life with the same exuberance I had. It was an epic fifteen or so year run, but it
was time to grow up, so I did. I started
neglecting my drinking, concentrating on my career more and before I knew it my
free time was entirely consumed with home maintenance, shuttling people-larvae
to various extra-curricular activities and trying to figure out how to fit the
occasional meal in when a few precious seconds of free time opened up somewhere
in all that chaos. Eventually, I became
chronically fatigued, fat and entirely consumed by the corporate Borg. I had become the cliché, having completely
embraced the repetitive, secure, and mind-numbingly ordinary existence I had considered
a fate worse than death two decades earlier.
It is long past time
to break out of that. I am under no
illusions, my days of bar brawling my way across the Orient are long gone, but
that does not mean I have to resign myself to merely existing instead of truly
living. Don’t get me wrong, I still like
my booze despite the fact that I have kind of been neglecting my drinking for
the better part of a decade now. In
fact, I cannot really write these “stream of consciousness” pieces without a
drink on hand and the silver mug full of my signature Guatemalan Duck Sucker cocktail
positioned half a foot away from my left hand right now is really The Libertine
Manifesto’s creative advisor and G.D. Sucker is the one who advised me to start
this blog so I could plug away at something when my muses get too stoned to
show up for work on my other two writing projects.
So what is the
Libertine Manifesto going to be about?
Basically, my hopes for the manifesto are to be an instructional manual
on how to live a life less ordinary. It
may be my mid-life crisis talking, or maybe the liberal amount of rum that
oversaturated my last Guatemalan Duck Sucker, but I kind of came to the stark
realization that I have more good years behind me than I do in front of me and
I really have no plans to throw any more of them away on merely
subsisting. I am going to get my novels
written. I am also going to get SCUBA
certified. While I am at it, I am going
to take up sky diving. I am going to
become fluent in a foreign language and learn to play an instrument. I am going to learn to grow the vegetables required
to formulate the perfect salsa and really take a Zen approach to perfecting my repertoire
of cocktail recipes. I am going to earn
a black belt in something and I am going to figure out a way to leverage my
writing skills in a way that will pay enough for me to get to some exotic
locale every couple of years so that I can drink too much and make really poor,
but highly entertaining, decisions that I intend to document right here.
You see, I am
not planning on just writing The Libertine Manifesto. I am planning on living it and living it well enough
to convince a few of you to join me in doing so.
BONUS – GUATEMALAN DUCK SUCKER
RECIPE
Fill a 24oz mug with ice
Add 2-3 shots of Bacardi Light
Rum
Squeeze the juice of ½ Lime into
the mug
Top off with 7Up
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