I have heard everything from having “a clamoring and disruptive, argumentative committee in my head, full of voices raging towards self-destruction” to having “a little bastard chained up there in my head that I can’t feed (but that I sometimes do) or he will devour any good sense I may be able to muster.” Committee meetings are their own nemeses; that makes them a gift that keeps on giving. Very few people much enjoy committee meetings anyway, at least not really, and little bastards are… well, just that: little bastards. And for the record, the term “bastard” is purely pejorative in this context because that creature has a father and anyone housing one of these ungrateful little creatures knows precisely who is the little bugger’s daddy. My case is quite different. The ‘committee’ room is very big and breathtakingly lavish with pews and brass rails and cushions for sitting, usually a plush burgundy sort of type of cushion with maybe some gold-fringed handy-work embroidered nicely around the circumference or perimeter of the cushy pillow, depending on its shape. Lots of dark wood and marble floors because the click-and-the-clack of the shoes’ clickity-clackity clops’ echoes adds a certain sense of formality to the din of my darkened chamber. All of the chamber members are very well-dressed. They are educated, have wonderfully literate minds and are very well-read. They embarrass the oratory skills of the finest Toastmasters chapter, and are oh so very, very polite. And all of them drink. They are very fancy people with whom I regularly disagree but rarely debate. But, you see, this is good because we once upon a time not so very long ago only argued. Arguing makes me angry. When the world was upside down on any given very dappled day in a very dappled way, dappled with drunken depression and do-little nothingness—other than to decorate for today’s rainy day overly anticipated pitter-patter pity party— came the pitter-patter rain and its ugly muddy muddle-puddles. The sun did not shine, and it was too wet to play, so I sat in my house every long stormy day to do what I did, and I did what I do…what I do when I drink, fol the diddle I do: I drank. And not just a little and not just a lot, so every cold Red Stripe had a friend called “a shot.” Sometimes liquor, sometimes wine. Most of the time the result was a crime against me or myself: the very nature of I (and yes me knows the object pronoun is the correct grammatically proper form). Real grammar calls that pronoun “case accusative.” But I digress. Correcting my grammar will get you nowhere. If I wanted to correct it, I’d darn well do it myself. Easy does it. Nothing ever gets better when I drink. Fact. Even in sobriety things aren’t always so very simple. A brain trained by alcoholic indulgence is a sick mind in spite of its career achievements, its social class or its education. Alcoholism has one superior characteristic that no human can claim more than that to which s/he aspires: alcoholism does not discriminate. None the matter from where we have nor from where we sail; alcoholic rain falls mainly in the drains that becomes of our brains. John Barleycorn’s grains run through our veins until the pains in our Haynes require cranes trains and planes and eventually canes as we feign to gain but wane, for the pain maims once healthy souls into utter nothingness. And we many of us accept it for quite a very long time as the good life. Hard to believe.