Slash and What it Means to be Sober

I’m going to pick up one of those cliché “two types of people” lenses to describe my thoughts right now, but I think the cliché works here: Those who are sober and those who aren’t.  When I talk about sobriety, I’m not necessarily referring to the absence of chemical substances as we know them, (although those certainly are included), but to anything which one might use to “escape”.  One’s “substance” might be consumerism, religion, over-work or anything which focuses the mind outward instead of inward.  It’s the escape from self that is the issue, not the way it is done.  I personally didn’t realize how foggy my thoughts were until I got “sober” in all areas of my life.  The clarity I’ve now found is astounding. 

I read Slash’s autobiography because I’ve always been a GN’R fan, but also because I knew that he’d recently gotten “clean” from chemical dependency (I think it’s been 3 years now).  I was curious about his path, and wanted to know many things, not least of which was whether he was “sober” or simply “clean”.  But also, having lived in Las Vegas and having been on the opposite side of the music industry in the form of radio, I thought I might relate to him in some way.  I was right.  The fame element for me obviously wasn’t there, but many other issues clearly were; e.g. similar personality traits, a lack of accountability in our lives, career decisions which made it easy to pursue substance abuse, and an apparent element of fate that has kept us both alive.

Chemical substances haven’t been a part of my life for a while now.  However, detaching the perceived need for the substances was a lot more difficult than the substances themselves.  The need can quite easily be filled with something non-chemical, and often is.  The personal work required to get rid of that “need” is something that everyone must go through to be truly sober.  It’s a discovery of the internal and an ability to go there.  Slash talks about his inherent restlessness in the book.  “Restlessness is a fickle catalyst; it can drive you to achieve, or it can coax your demise.” That’s a trait that I’ve always had too.  I believe people are restless who have a greater than normal sense that things are out of balance.  It involves a certain degree of intuition. It can also be a realization that the “ideal” has not yet been reached.  It is a driving force, and is constantly on the move.  It heads very clearly in one direction and doesn’t take many detours.  Most of these types are “all or nothing” people.  When I pursue something, it’s with intensity and passion. 

It appears that Slash has at least discovered the key to sobriety, if not sobriety itself.  Only he knows whether he’s truly sober, but the right language is there.  “First I kicked the drugs, then I cleared my head and did some work on figuring out why I liked to put myself in the same position over and over again.”  “I’ve found that just *being*, day to day, just waiting to see what comes, and going from there is the only way to grow.”  Whether or not someone has a drink or even does a line is not the real issue, although I don’t believe any kind of good is ever achieved by either.  So in that sense I’m completely anti-substance at this point…not just for myself, but in general.  The legality makes no difference to me.  What “good” has ever been achieved by taking a drink?  However, to each their own, and I’m not on some kind of a crusade, it’s just my opinion derived from experience.  The most important thing is not the object used to escape, but the elimination of the need to escape in the first place.  There are many intoxicated people who don’t drink or do drugs.  If more would find a degree of awareness, we would all be that much better off. 

David Foster Wallace "Infinite Jest"

“It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way.” (p. 592). The level of comprehension required to have a decent grasp on life is entirely different than being able to articulate that knowledge. Enter the genius of David Foster Wallace.

Not having known the author, I can only guess that he was a truly empathetic individual. Infinite Jest is a modern classic, in part, because of the incredible difficulty of the various roles the author portrays. His greatest challenge is finding something relatable to everyone, and he succeeds tremendously. From the top of the social (and literal) hill of Enfield Tennis Academy to the bottom of drug addiction at Ennet House we SEE. We are taken inside the different personalities, conditions, social status and worldviews that comprise the complex search for the American “pursuit of happiness”.

I was a bit concerned until about halfway through the book that Wallace was making a parody of everything in life. I felt as I’ve often felt around people I know where anything serious/emotional/internal remains untouchable and is turned into a joke. I’m not deriding Wallace for his use of comedy. His brilliance in that respect has nothing to do with the completely different concept of humor as a cover. Then as if Wallace knew what the reader must have thought, the book took on a different tone. Sure, AA has cheesy clichés. But the program works, and we are forced to face the serious consequences of the possibility of addiction. You suddenly realize that Wallace has all along had you thinking like his characters. We see the stage of denial through the logical thought process as if we WERE the character. At the beginning, any help offered or any attempt to analyze the internal is laughed at by those who can’t face themselves. This is life. This is America.

Addictions take different forms, and the damaging ones are done so out of fear. The existential search for meaning seems to come to a dead end. The tennis prodigies at E.T.A. certainly had more in the American sense of “more” than the drug addicts at the bottom of the hill. Ironically though, many of these athletes were drug abusers themselves. The very idea of training them to be mentally tough and “transcend” self through accomplishment in sport produced a vacuum where nothing could be reached. Their escapism was no different than those they looked down upon. The more the American seeks through work, entertainment, intellectual accomplishments, drugs, sex and obsessive activity, the closer they get to the end. We are eventually forced to turn inside. It’s the only answer.

If I could have a conversation with Wallace, I would commend him for his portrayal of what undoubtedly were deeply personal feelings of depression. It is well known that he suffered greatly. The way he describes the total despair of various characters makes one sad to think about what he himself must have endured at his own end. It’s obvious to the reader that there was a great deal of openness and access to the darkest parts of Wallace’s mind.

From a purely literary standpoint, I have never read anything like Infinite Jest. The twists and turns of the book and the sheer mind-boggling process that must have gone into it are simply indescribable. The prose is some of the most intelligent I’ve experienced. The dialogue between the characters and the thoughts in their minds seem to have been written down by the characters themselves, not by one man. You will laugh, feel empty, find redemption, sink to low depths, realize the potential to rise above, relate in some way and end with unanswered questions. Sound a bit like life? I think that was the point.