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Prologue

On the night of June 10th, 2024, I was on top of the world, literally amongst the clouds, on a rooftop bar, toasting a glass of cabernet to the neon below, feeling like a modern-day Dionysus – a real god of wine and whimsy and witlessness and just getting as loaded as humanly possible. And by the next morning, I was dead.

This is the story of how I died.

Chapter I: Prelude to the Sheer Excitement of Golf

“Dionysus mingles in the wine new powers, sending high adventure to the thoughts of men.” –The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation. 1938.

Roughly nineteen hours earlier, on the tail end of June 9th, 2024, during those wee hours when the sun is barely birthed from the horizon and the dawn is covered in damp, I woke up from a half-sleep stupor wondering if I had gotten any sleep at all, as one does when they only get one hour of light sleep and absolutely no Michael Stipe^#1 sleep the night before. I had to wake up early – four-in-the-morning early – to catch a flight to the fairways^#2 of Maine; I was expected at a golf charity event the next day, for a client that I managed. At the time,^#3 I worked as a Customer Success Manager^#4 for a Contact Center as a Service^#5 company, and I managed a “portfolio of clients” (as they say in sales world), and sometimes these clients wanted me to attend their company events or travel to their headquarters to present some pretty-but-ultimately-meaningless slides or wine-and-dine them in some weird corporate courting ritual, all in an effort to convince them that they should continue to do business with us because everything they want and more is coming soon next quarter as indicated by our product roadmap on this slide but please note that the product roadmap is not set in stone as development priorities can shift due to market forces and client demand so please just renew your contract for another year or three because my job literally depends on it.

The client – Beckham, Inc., a government-funded call center supporting everything from military toilet paper recalls to passport renewals – wanted me and three of my coworkers to participate in eighteen holes of golf at their annual Beckham Golf Charity Event. The chosen few from my organization formed a foursome^#6: Anders, the Account Executive handling the overall sales relationship with Beckham, Inc.; Jordan, the Project Director overseeing a major move-to-cloud project for Beckham, Inc.; Doug, the Southeast Regional Vice President of Sales with a vested interest in maximizing profit from all clients; and myself, the Customer Success Manager responsible for securing Beckham, Inc.’s eventual two-million-dollar contract renewal.

The Beckham Golf Charity Event’s stated goal was to raise money for people with disabilities. So, on the surface, we would be golfing for a good cause. This was certainly one of the less demeaning things I had been tasked to do in the name of chasing those ever-sought-after capital-B capital-D Big Deals. However, as with any company expense, the trip was wrapped in several layers of corporate complexity that any barely tenured salesperson would pick up on immediately: not only were we golfing to raise money for people with disabilities, but also for the assurance of a multi-year contract renewal (which I was responsible for), a potential upsell of software licenses ranging somewhere within the three-million-dollar range (which Anders was responsible for), the success of an ongoing move-to-cloud project (which Jordan was responsible for), and the we-actually-love-our-customers-it’s-not-all-about-the-money brown nosing present in all vendor-client relationships (of which we were all responsible for). The people with disabilities were only a proxy for our company’s bottom line; if we refused to go to Beckham’s Golf Charity Event, we would be hearing about this refusal on every video call and in every email for the next two years, after which Beckham, Inc. would likely decline to renew their contract with us; thus losing their business, thus losing our jobs. And you can replace the words “Beckham’s Golf Charity Event” with literally any other client request, because this is the crux of all corporate relationships: the product is far less important than the asses being kissed. Sellers display faux care only for the benefit of their quarterly sales goals, and the bigger the potential deal, the more faux care they muster. This means doing whatever the client wants to secure those Big Deals. I’ve had salespeople tell me, straight up, “If a client told me they’d sign this five-million-dollar deal if I killed someone for them, I would do it no questions asked, and I’d bake the liability into the Ts and Cs.”^#7 (Whether this particular salesperson was joking or not, this writer couldn’t tell.) The point being, if you want to be a quote-unquote Good Salesperson (oxymoron), you have to demean yourself, it is quite literally baked into the role.

*golfing for people with disabilities – and money.

What this whole golf thing meant for me, having never played before in my life,^#8 was that I needed to get familiar with the sport, and fast; and the only way I knew how to do that was by playing computer games or by reading books, and the prospect of reading a book with the words “All About the Sheer Excitement of Golf!” somewhere on the cover made my stomach turn, so computer games were the only viable option.

Since the Game Boy Color was (and still is) my favorite console ever – primarily driven by 8-bit-pixel-perfect summers at grandma’s house – I naturally gravitated toward the classic Game Boy Color version of Mario Golf for my crash course in the Sheer Excitement of Golf. I downloaded the ROM file^#9 and moved it into some folder within a folder on my cheap Chinese handheld emulation device’s SD card, and just like that I was ready to learn every little technicality of this legendary Scottish pastime,^#10 and familiarize myself with all the golf lingo (I’m going with “glingo” going forward). In fact, part of the reason I didn’t get much sleep on the night of June 9th was because I was lying on a mattress in my living room playing digital golf. This living-room-mattress-computer-game dynamic was necessary so as not to wake my infant son from his precious baby sleeps when the time came for me to gather my wings and fly. Suffice it to say, the mattress was not comfortable, Michael Stipe did not visit me that night, and I didn’t learn very much about golf. I did learn, however, that Mario Golf for the Game Boy Color was developed by Camelot Software Planning (of the famed Golden Sun series); and that the game was a surprisingly competent companion to Mario 64 (which was also developed by Camelot and released earlier that same year, 1999); and that the game included a full glingo dictionary with over 50 glingos, on-point golf-ball physics with seemingly perfect gravity-wind interplay, an eminently satisfying golf-swing power bar that requires perfectly timed button presses to land those highly coveted hole-in-ones,^#11 a traversable overworld a la Japanese-role-playing games dotted with country clubs just waiting to be conquered, and (as if this run-on sentence wasn’t long enough) it played the Super Mario Bros. “Underground Theme”^#12 on potential birdie putts^#13; all this and more was wrapped in a charming pixel aesthetic that took full advantage of the Game Boy Color’s 32,768 colors in a way that was quite pleasing to my very tired eyes indeed.

Before I knew it, I had driven many a ball down many a fairway and, on one hour of sleep, it was time to drive to the Jacksonville, Florida Airport to catch my six-o’clock flight to Maine aboard an American Airlines A319 Airbus.^#14 On the flight, I started reading a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace – Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (many of these essays I had read before) – while sitting next to an older woman who kept twirling long strands of brown hair around her fingers and occasionally asking me things like, “So, are you from Jacksonville? What are you reading? What’s it about? Do you know if they serve alcohol on this flight? Do you drink?”

And while I mostly nodded and tried as politely as possible to blow her off, I wanted to say …

“Hell yeah, lady. I drink.”

Chapter II: The Software Pantheon

“The divine madness … prophetic, initiatory, poetic, erotic, having four gods presiding over them … Apollo, the second that of Dionysus, the third that of the Muses, the fourth that of Aphrodite and Eros.” –The Dialogues of Plato, 3rd ed. 1892.

II.I: Shakedown, 2022

But I really shouldn’t.

Flashback two years earlier. I was, curiously enough, on the same trip to Maine for the same annual Beckham Golf Charity Event, staying at the same luxury Marriott hotel^#15 right smack dab in the middle of downtown Maine. I was not playing golf this time, only helping the volunteers pass out drinks and snacks at hole nine. I was there with a Sales Executive, not Anders but a different guy named Jeff, and accompanying us were some other bigwig sales dudes; these guys were standoffish with several Big Deals under their belts, full of sales-snoot, and they were big into partying; I’m talking three-in-the-morning-hotel-room-balcony-cocaine-snorting-tequila-shots-flowing-hotel-security-being-called-because-people-are-trying-to-sleep partying. After dinner, Jeff and I somehow ended up in the room of one of these bigwig sales guys. I was already two glasses of cabernet in from dinner; and once I start drinking: I. Don’t. Stop. Under any circumstance, I just do not stop. So I had one or two or seven shots of tequila, passed on the cocaine because I did that once in high school and ended up wanting to throw myself off a very similar balcony to the one I found myself on in this bigwig’s hotel room. The bigwig I ended up talking to most was literally named Steven Brag, he was a Vice President of Sales of Some Sort, and his attitude fit his last name to a tee. Your not-so-humble narrator here had seven shots too many and found himself in a pretty deep conversation with this Brag guy about climbing the corporate ladder and what I described as (I’m ad-libbing a bit because the whole night was whirlwind heat and flash) “a hamster wheel with little spikes that tear away at your personality over time and leave you bitter and dead and eventually forgotten because sales doesn’t impart one goddamn meaningful thing on anybody other than the evils of the perpetuation of money as a proxy for love and an economy of suffering,” and this Brag guy looked me dead in the eye and said, “then why are you here?” And I said something like, “because my friend referred me, but I would literally work at McDonald’s if it paid enough, that’s how little this job fulfills me. This job is just a means to an end. That’s it.” And I likely went on like this for quite some time indeed before Brag – between organizing a line of cocaine with a gold-plated debit card and snorting it off the table – with a manic calm said, “Alright, then I’m going to tell David about this.” David was my boss at the time, a good guy who probably would have laughed and shrugged it off, but I thought: what if he didn’t laugh and shrug it off? I then became very nervous and quiet after it clicked that this guy could certainly get me fired if he wanted to, and Brag sensed this nervousness and doubled down; he said something like, “what, don’t you want to work at McDonald’s? It’s no different than this job, right?” This guy was trying to prove me wrong – put me in my place beneath his Louis Vuitton Men’s Designer Sneakers, and maybe he was right; maybe he called my bluff. It became clear that I had offended Mr. Brag, because after what must have been a whole three minutes of death stares and silence, he stood up, walked into the main room, and started talking to someone else. At that point, I felt it was prudent to leave, and when I passed Brag on the way out he didn’t say a word to me. I made it back to my hotel room by around four in the morning with a cloud of anxious is-this-guy-going-to-get-me-fired-what-am-I-even-doing-here-is-my-life-a-total-joke dread hanging over my head, and I had to wake up for the golf event by six, which was in two hours.

But it was OK, I could make it, I told myself. I prided myself on never having blacked out. I saw myself as a modern-day Dionysus. Yes, I could get really really wasted, but I never blacked out. Yes, I may be doing and saying incredibly questionable things, but I am in complete control, I told myself. I can be a complete wastrel whilst still attending to my adult responsibilities, I told myself.

So of course I was awakened by my wife after she had tried to reach me on my cell phone several times (which was on silent, of course) and then called the hotel I was staying at to get my room number but the hotel receptionist wouldn’t give her my room number for security reasons or something and she eventually contacted Jeff who happened to know my room number and then she was finally able to call my room directly, and I woke up to a stern, “Forrest – it’s 10 AM, aren’t you supposed to be at the charity event?” May all the gods bless her beautiful soul.

I got out of bed faster than anyone ever has, put on my stupid polo shirt and khakis, called a taxi, and made it out to that golf event several hours late faster than anyone ever has. And somehow, I wasn’t fired; there were no real lasting consequences at all. And eventually Steven Brag “moved on”^#16 from the company, so the threat of him getting me fired evaporated like the morning dew that I so irresponsibly missed that hazy golf morning. If there was any real consequence, it was that I had forgotten to take my acid reflux medication, so I had excruciating wine-induced heartburn during the entire charity event.

“Forrest was late for the golf event because he drank too much,” became a meme in both my company and within Beckham, Inc. At the time, like every other time, I told myself, “OK – that’s the last time I’m doing that, for real this time.” But I would do it again. I would rationalize myself straight into another drunken stupor weeks – sometimes days – later. Every time. And this wasn’t the only time something like this had happened. I can count at least seven other equally embarrassing drinking stories in which I was either late to a serious meeting, broke something important, said something insensitive to the wrong person, flat-out hurt myself, or did all of these things at once after imbibing one too many glasses of cabernet.

*The Fool? Nay – Dionysus.

I saw myself as a modern-day Dionysus. I was part of The Software Pantheon. People treated me like the god of revelry and ritual madness. “Forrest’s going out with us tonight – he may seem quiet now, but this guy is funny as fuck after a few drinks!” They would say. I was part of The Software Pantheon. I was no Fool. I was a real modern-day Dionysus. I could do no wrong. I was a god.

That’s what I told myself.

I guess this is the part where you want me to say something real introspective like: Hi, my name is Forrest and I am an alcoholic. I haven’t been formally diagnosed^#17 or anything, and I haven’t gone to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting; and frankly, I’m a little too proud to go to one. I don’t need this “higher power” rigmarole to abstain from drinking; I can do it through sheer force of will, I think. I am not emotionally manipulated by liquids, is what I tell myself. I know I might maybe be an alcoholic, that’s the most important thing, right? The first step: I am self-aware! I am intelligent! My brain can fight the poison! I was late for the golf event, but everyone had a good laugh and there was no real harm done. I don’t need to drink, but if I do I’ll be OK; I always have been. I have never blacked out; that’s what I told myself. Never blacked out, not even once. Yes, sometimes I slip up, but I have never blacked out – just ask Wanda.

II.II: Dionysus Rising, 2024

Wanda remembers. She was there to witness Dionysus stumble out of a golf cart into the volunteer’s booth four hours later than scheduled. In fact, days before flying out to the 2024 Beckham Golf Charity Event, she told me on a Zoom call, “Don’t forget – you actually have to golf this time. Don’t drink too much! And don’t be late!” Wanda remembers.

Wanda was an honorary member of The Software Pantheon. She was our main point of contact over at Beckham, Inc. She was^#18 a fifty-something-year-old Workforce Director with a perpetual chip on her shoulder. She enjoyed drinking Rolling Rock beer while listening to classic rock because, in her own words, “they just don’t make music like they used to,” she also enjoyed Prince’s music because, in her own words again, “I have very varied taste in obscure music.” She spoke with a gruff cigarette-stained lisp and her right eye would twitch slightly every few words. She would blow up on anyone who dared question her hyper logical but very draconian workforce edicts while simultaneously escalating even the most basic support cases because she felt Beckham, Inc. was more important than any of the other 1,000-something clients my company handled. I got the impression that she was feisty even outside of work, as her last name changed at least three times since I met her. Her raucous attitude surely contributed to the streaks of gray in her carrot-colored hair, but this was also a consequence of the endless stress that she put on herself by taking her job way too fucking seriously – and the expletive is absolutely necessary here: she literally had a cardiac arrest while presenting her 2023 Company Objective slides on a Zoom call to me and twenty other people; we all watched in horror (and myself in some sort of deranged amusement) as her second (late) husband frantically rushed through the door in the backdrop of her webcam, lifted her up from her toppled chair, and then rolled that chair – with Wanda convulsing in it – out the door and straight into an ambulance (one would hope). Needless to say, that meeting was cut short. Wanda’s doctor ordered a leave from work for three months, but Wanda returned in two weeks, nearly always faint of breath and needing constant breaks, but she would “not be stopped” (her words). She told me weeks later that both her doctor and her husband were “overreacting and it wasn’t that big of a deal, but I did stop smoking cigarettes and now I only have three glasses of wine a day instead of four – doctor’s orders.” And in this writer’s opinion, if it takes a serious heart attack to quit smoking, drink less wine, and maybe chill out a little bit – then thank god for fatty artery buildups.

I would be getting even closer with Wanda, because after I touched down in Maine on June 10th, 2024, I found out that Doug – the Vice President of Sales – couldn’t make it to the golf event, which turned our foursome into a threesome. But Wanda, despite her propensity for cardiac catastrophe, was more than willing to take Doug’s place within the marble-columned halls of The Software Pantheon.

The rest of The Software Pantheon included Anders and Jordan. Anders was an alright guy. He was on the portly side, buzzed his head because his hairline was Sahara barren (and you could tell), around fifty or something, lacked a memorable personality, and didn’t know how to hold a conversation so ended up just repeating back everything you said to him in the form of a surprised question which he must have thought was some sort of conversational momentumizer^#19 but actually came across as slightly condescending – “Do you really have two kids? What do you mean you don’t watch much TV?! How can you not like mushroom pizza?!” – and he had been divorced twice but was also a real family man, so if he were to hold a conversation, it would likely be about his kids. Jordan, on the other hand, was a bit more intriguing. Jordan was tall, like 6’5” tall, real heavy set guy, forties, decent sense of humor, and had this prankster attitude that you could tell was never corrected from childhood – granted, most of these “pranks” were just straight-up lies, literally stuff like “hey, that woman over there said she wanted to talk to you,” when no such thing occurred, all in an attempt to make a fool of the person he was pranking, which was often me; and he was quite good at this, as he was able to keep a straight face in nearly all prankster situations, making him the type of person that you can never fully trust. The most interesting thing to me about Jordan, however, was that he had an ear piercing but no earring; I could tell from the obvious hole in his ear.

Both Jordan and Anders were everyday guys with everyday interests. Their taste in music was dictated by 107.5 The Hits, their knowledge of cinema was only Disney movies that their kids wanted them to watch, and they spent all of their free time “watching the game” either on TV or in a stadium. They absolutely never played computer games and thought everyone who did was a never-grew-up person that attracted Cheeto dust like the strongest magnet attracts metal filings; and none of that stuff mattered to them much anyway, because they firmly believed that the most important thing in life is making enough money to support their families – everything else is a distraction. In short, Jordan and Anders were two of the most unpretentious people I had ever met.

There was one thing that both Jordan and Anders loved more than anything else (besides their own children, one would hope; and money, I guess), and that was drinking alcohol.

*Bacchus, oil on canvas by Caravaggio, 1596–97 + original hotel room photography; note: Bacchus is the Roman name for Dionysus.

On June 10th, 2024, when I arrived at that same Marriott hotel from two years prior – as the only and oh-so-unlikely survivor of the 2022 Beckham Golf Charity Event (considering both Jeff and Brag had “moved on” by this point) – and Jordan called me on my cell phone, asking me to meet him and Anders at the rooftop bar on the 11th floor, I just had to oblige. These were my colleagues after all, and I wouldn’t want to be seen as some pretentious weirdo, right? That could hurt my own bottom line (an irony that I am all too aware of). Knowing that I had been up for almost eighteen hours on one hour of sleep, I told myself that I would go to the rooftop bar real quick, say hi, then duck out of there and get some sleep.

In the Roman column adorned lobby of that hotel, I swear, I was not thinking about drinking – the experience in this same hotel two years prior was playing out over and over in my mind, and I truly did not want to repeat the sins of the past. I would go up to the rooftop bar, I would say hi, and then I would duck out – that’s what I told myself.

The clock read 8:30 PM. After getting checked into the hotel and settling my bags in my 9th floor room, I video called my wife to let her know that I made it and gave her my room number and made goofy faces to my infant son who was just about ready to go down for bed. I then headed up to the rooftop bar.

When I got to the bar, I went to the outside portion and looked down at the neon below. Memories from my previous 2022 dalliance started racing through my mind. I started to wonder if Steven Brag was right about everything; if he had really called my bluff; if all that working-at-McDonald’s stuff was just posturing a superficial morally superior viewpoint in some vain attempt to appear better than the salespeople I was surrounded by; I could feel Brag’s Louis Vuitton Men’s Designer Sneakers pushing into the side of my head, and the pressure was building up. I was grateful that Brag was no longer with the company because I’m pretty sure that guy hated me more than anyone has ever hated me in my entire life. Was I that contemptible? That transparent? That foolish? That hypocritical? Should I quit my job and pursue what I really love doing instead? But wouldn’t that hurt my family, who depend on me? If that’s the case, then is the accumulation of wealth the be-all and end-all goal in life? THE MOST IMPORTANT THING? After all, more money means I can buy a bigger house, put more food on the table, get a pool in the backyard, not have to worry about mortgage payments, save two shelter dogs and see the look of joy on my son’s face as I bring those pups home, and just provide an overall more comfortable life for my family in general; but if money is a proxy for well-being, why do I feel so sick chasing after it? Isn’t my family comfortable enough already? Why do we need an even bigger house, or a pool? Or is this a defeatist attitude? Why should I have to anguish over these questions at all? I didn’t choose to be born into this endless hamster wheel. Should I just jump off this balcony? I have a life insurance policy. Why am I really here? Am I a fraud? Am I Dionysus or am I The Fool? Or is it OK because compromised values are just part and parcel of the quote-unquote American Way of Life? If everyone else is compromised, maybe I shouldn’t even worry about it? But I am worrying about it. How do I stop worrying about it? And just as I was about to completely spiral out of control on my psychic bullshit, a tap on the shoulder snapped me back to reality.

It was Jordan. He was carrying a glass of deep purple; he said, “Hey man, I heard you like to party – you still drink, right?”

I wanted to make the questions go away, so I turned to him with a wide grin and said,

“Hell yeah, man. I still drink.”

Part 2

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Footnotes:

#1. Lead singer of the alternative rock band R.E.M., a guitar-pop group inspired by the accessible psychedelia of The Soft Boys and the jangling guitars of The Byrds. R.E.M. was at its peak during the mid to late ’80s and throughout the ’90s and has effectively retired as of 2011. (Per Peter Buck, lead guitarist for the band, “It was the money, the politics, having to meet new people 24 hours a day, not being in charge of my own decisions.” Thus solidifying this publication’s insistence that money corrupts with no exception.) I don’t think the band ever topped “So. Central Rain” and “Radio Free Europe,” two of their earliest singles, but they occasionally came close. The joke within the main text, at this point, should be obvious, but I feel the need to explain it for the sake of thoroughness: the band name stands for Rapid Eye Movement (sleep), which is “a sleep phase in mammals characterized by random rapid movement of the eyes which typically happens 90 minutes after you fall asleep” (per Wikipedia). On the night of June 9th (/morning of June 10th), I got less than one hour of sleep.

#2. In golf lingo (glingo?), “fairway” refers to the part of the golf course between the tee and the green. The green is the area around the actual hole – the hole that you’re supposed to hit the golf ball into: the one with the flag and whatnot. Golf courses have at least eighteen holes and follow the same general format: each hole has a tee-off location (where you put your ball on the miniature wooden stake and then whack it with a golf club); each has a long stretch of pristinely kept but incredibly artificial-looking grass (the fairway); and finally, another separate patch of fake-looking but slightly off-colored grass (to distinguish it from the fairway) around the hole (the green). Got all that?

#3. As of writing (and publishing) this piece, I still work for the same unnamed company. However, I wanted to future-proof this piece by writing most of it in the past tense. Jobs don’t last forever; I’m just a quarterly sales goal on some executive’s spreadsheet, after all – and if I don’t hit those goals, I’m gone. To be honest with you, dear reader, as of writing this, I have kinda “quiet quit” from the whole work thing (and this is expanded on in the next footnote). I would work at a McDonald’s if the pay was livable (and this is expanded on in the second chapter); homeostasis being what it is. I am thankful, however, that my current position is work-from-home, which affords me ample time to pursue my true interests (and write this massive piece). And, look, I’m not stealing from the company, I do put in effort to maintain my work, just not very much effort.

#4. The role of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) lacks a solidified job description, making it nebulous and weird across different industries. It’s somewhere between middle management and executive level; middle-middle management, if you will. CSMs are authorized to speak and act on behalf of the company when dealing with line managers, junior staff and customers. Generally, a CSM builds a trusted relationship with a customer (or “client”) after the sales process in an effort to drive retention and upsell (upsell being: selling more stuff to already existing customers). For a client, this process might look like buying software from a company, getting it implemented, and then, once everything is up and running, being handed off into a support contract that includes a dedicated CSM that tends to their every beck and call. This means that CSMs are often the closest to a company’s customers and know explicitly what those customers love about the product; and they especially know what those customers hate about the product too, as an almost mandatory CSM job requirement is the ability to Shut Up and Listen and Not Take Things Personally. In some software companies, CSMs are part of the support team: if something goes wrong with the product, the CSM is the customer’s main point of contact to escalate and resolve the issue as quickly as possible. In other companies, a CSM might function within the sales organization as a relationship builder, an arm of support, and a driver of revenue by selling add-ons and other products to the clients that they manage. This dual-sales-support approach is contradictory in nature because a CSM is often seen as the customer’s trusted friend within the company, “an extension of the client.” Sales, however, requires a level of duplicity that could potentially undermine this trusted relationship; for example, if a new product is added to the company’s software suite and this new product is still in a very-green-and-barely-functional state, the Executive Leadership Team might have a sales goal of $11 million riding on this new product, with your own yearly goal being $500,000, so you are wink-wink-nudge-nudged into selling this half-working-borderline-bait-and-switch product to clients, which means you’re not going to tell clients that it’s a half-working-borderline-bait-and-switch product to begin with, which means you are a fucking liar simply by virtue of trying to keep your job; but being a CSM, you’re expected to be the client’s trusted friend, yet you are simultaneously encouraged to lie to the client in an attempt to penny-pinch their every last cent. This causes a certain level of cognitive dissonance, anxiety, and madness in the CSM that results in one of three things: 1) The CSM embraces the corporate duplicity and revels in the sales process; in which case they were already a psychopath to begin with (psychopathy being one of the main prerequisites for being a successful salesperson); 2) The cognitive dissonance builds up to the point where the CSM is forced to accept that it’s “just business,” and, when they turn off their work computer for the day, the computer screen functions as a benign demon-summoning circle, effectively locking the corporate hellworld away until the CSM is begrudgingly forced to unlock the seal the next day to continue supporting their family while perpetuating the hellworld by allowing themselves to be one of its little demon spawn (this is where I’m at); or 3) They quit and move on to greener pastures, but only the truly privileged can do this option because it’s not as if people want to become CSMs or salespeople, they do so because (causality being what it is) their bad choices led them to these positions as the only realistic options at the moment. It’s safe to say that if someone has one of these corporate-hellworld job titles, they probably didn’t grow up telling mommy and daddy that they want to be a CSM when they grow up, and if they did then I hope I never have the displeasure of meeting that person.

#5. A “Contact Center as a Service” (or CCaaS) company is one of the many variations of the modern CaaS company (which stands for both “Content as a Service” and “Container as a Service,” and I’m sure there are other names too). The “Contact Center” bit refers to selling software specifically targeted at call centers; call centers are like the nebulous place you would reach if you called your internet provider’s customer service line; it follows that my company sells stuff like call recording, desktop monitoring, workforce management, things like that. All CaaS companies sell software that is located within what they call their “cloud”; and “cloud” is a fancy (and tricky) way of saying “physical off-site servers located in a warehouse somewhere that we may or may not rent from another company.” These CaaS companies are nearly always pay-as-you-go cloud-based services with a subscription model. Before 2010, many software solutions were “on-premises” (or “on-prem”); a company would buy software, deploy it locally with their own hardware, and maintain it locally with their own IT and support teams. Starting around 2010, the technology for putting things into “the cloud” started taking off, and seeing this as an opportunity to siphon more money out of customers, many companies that offered on-prem software solutions started moving their product to cloud-based CaaS models; this allowed the company to charge customers not only setup and integration fees but recurring subscription fees; think of it like Netflix or Spotify, but with enterprise-level software like Microsoft Office or whatever. Companies that made the switch from selling on-prem to selling cloud often pitched their new cloud service as a way to “get continuous software updates in real time” and “get 24/7 support without having to rely on a smelly IT team within your own organization” and “ditch your physical hardware and let us do all the processing for you.” But the reality is, cloud software solutions take control away from the customer and put it all in the hands of a soulless corporate entity that is governed by sketchy legal immunities and weird MSAs (Master Service Agreements) with hundreds of stipulations like, “if your data gets leaked or hacked, we are totally not liable.” It’s no mystery why every software company – including game publishers – is trying to move to cloud models: it provides them with more customer data, which allows them to more effectively advertise to you, sell you more stuff, and the subscription model is more profitable long term than selling a product that the customer can keep indefinitely. Cloud models keep you paying for the same thing over and over again while never truly owning or controlling your own data.

#6. Foursomes, also known as Alternate Shot, is a golf format where two partners play together as a team, using a single ball. In this format, the partners take turns hitting the ball on each hole, whether in match play or stroke play. HOWEVER, even though both the Beckham representatives and my own co-workers said we were “playing foursomes,” we weren’t actually playing foursomes in a strict sense; we were to play a casual version where we hit one ball after another and just kept going from the ball closest to the hole (this is explained in greater detail later in Chapter 6).

#7. “Ts and Cs” is the corporate-email-speak shortening of “Terms and Conditions,” which is a clause in a document (or an entire document itself) that outlines the contractual obligations of both the seller and buyer if the contract is signed. For example, common T&Cs verbiage on a renewal contract will state something like, “if the customer does not provide written notice of refusal to renew within 30 days of their contract end date, the contract will auto-renew with a 3% increase from the previous contract value.” Oftentimes, the important T&Cs that have far-reaching implications are buried in paragraphs of meaningless legal speak, which makes sense because companies hire lawyers to write very specific T&Cs that are often reused over and over depending on the situation. “Ts and Cs” and its variants is also fun to say, just sorta rolls off the tongue. Its pleasurable pronunciation belies its often-terrible implications.

#8. This is not necessarily true. I have played golf before, but it was when I was nine or ten. I used to visit my grandpa’s house as a kid, and he would take me to the country club, and we’d hit balls. I hated it. According to my mom, I would refuse to get in the car whenever we were going to my grandpa’s house because I just hated golf so much. This hatred of golf is now a running joke in my family; whenever I talk to my grandpa, he says something like, “Hey, you should visit soon – I won’t force you to play golf this time, I promise!” When I told grandpa that I played golf with a client (see: this story), he sent me a huge box of golf paraphernalia (which included a putter “used by the pros” [his words]) that is now languishing in my garage. I can’t imagine the shipping he paid on that.

#9. Read-Only Memory; a ROM image, or ROM file, is a file that holds a copy of the data from a read-only memory chip (like one you would find in a Super Nintendo or Sega Mega Drive cartridge.) Emulation is then used to let you run these ROMs on modern devices, effectively mimicking the old hardware through software wizardry. I played Mario Golf on a Miyoo Mini+, a compact device designed to resemble a Game Boy Color.

#10. Boring encyclopedic stuff easily found online, but for the sake of thoroughness, here you go: “The modern game of golf originated in 15th century Scotland. The 18-hole round was created at the Old Course at St Andrews in 1764. Golf’s first major, and the world’s oldest golf tournament, is The Open Championship, also known as the British Open, which was first played in 1860 at the Prestwick Golf Club in Ayrshire, Scotland.” Per Wikipedia (lol).

#11. More glingo. A “hole-in-one” is when a golfer sinks the ball into the hole on their tee shot (the first shot); this is incredibly rare, and many professional golfers go their whole careers having never achieved this feat; I did it once in Mario Golf. More swing-related glingo: “pin high,” a shot that lands on the green from the tee; “up and down,” when a golfer gets their ball onto the green then into the hole in just two strokes. A “stroke” is the forward movement of the club made to strike the ball, or fancy glingo for “swing”; a “stiffed shot” is one that lands very close to the hole off the tee shot; “pure shot” is one that is perfectly struck with clean, solid contact (this may also be called a “flush,” which also refers to the solid contact made between a golf club’s face and the ball); and a “check up” is when a ball lands on the green but stops quickly with minimal roll, usually due to “backspin” (which is, coincidentally, another shot type in golf that makes the ball spin backward; I am entirely unsure how to achieve this and don’t really care enough to find out – if I do one day care enough, you have permission to kill me).

#12. You already know this jingle; and if you don’t, what are you even doing here?

#13. The term “birdie” refers to when a player takes one swing less to get the ball into the hole than the par of a hole itself. “Par” is the set number of strokes that a golfer, typically with a zero handicap, is expected to need to complete a hole. A “handicap” is kind of what it sounds like but is far too complicated for me to fully explain here (and I don’t want to explain it), so I’m going to point you to this article, which covers every little detail about handicaps.

#14. One of those white narrow-body, medium-range things. Airplanes look kinda like elongated diet-soda cans with poorly glued-on attachments to me – real unnatural abominations that just shouldn’t be up there in bird airspace. Some real avian heresy. It doesn’t help that American Airlines airbuses feel like they haven’t been renovated since the early ’70s; while most airlines now have little monitors on the back of the seats or maybe a USB plug or two to keep your stuff charged up, the American Airlines A319 airbus has one foot of legroom and a back-seat pouch that literally nothing can fit in except the thinnest magazine – that’s it. When the flight attendant tells you to “place your electronics in the off position and stow them away safely,” what they really mean is, “just throw that shit on the floor.” Don’t get me wrong, airplanes are technical marvels that help keep us connected to friends and loved ones, but maybe – just maybe – we wouldn’t need to take airplanes to see our friends and families if airplanes didn’t exist to take those same friends and family away from us to begin with.

#15. The hotel, including all travel and food expenses, was (is) covered by the company. If it were up to me, I’d stay in a motel – I don’t care. In fact, I find cheap motels have more character than the typical company-preferred Marriotts and Hyatts. Regardless, you best believe I splurge on junk food – pizza, sweet candy, pretzels – during these trips, and I expense every last cent of it.

#16. When someone has “moved on from the company,” this means (9 times out of 10) that they were fired. “Moved on” is clever corporate speak to cover up layoffs and keep morale up without outright lying because technically getting fired is “moving on from the company.” Example: “John has moved on from the company; yes, I know he was your boss and you talked to him every day; I know it’s weird he didn’t even say goodbye and that he just kind of vanished, but that’s because he has moved on to different opportunities. We are all sad to see him go. He was a great asset to the company.” (Note: I’ve heard people say that companies can only do this if they laid off less than 10% of the workforce; there are supposedly legal requirements for companies to announce layoffs of 10% or more, although I have never seen this claim substantiated and it probably varies from state to state.)

#17. According to the Mayo Clinic, alcoholism is: “a chronic disease characterized by uncontrolled drinking and preoccupation with alcohol.” Doctors can diagnose alcoholism (or “Alcohol Use Disorder” if we want to get technical) using diagnostic manuals like the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). But my question is, can you be diagnosed with alcoholism if you have never taken a sip of alcohol in your life? Do you just have alcoholism from genetics or whatever? Or is alcoholism more like a predisposition to a lack of impulse control, which lends itself to addiction and substance abuse of all types? Perhaps “alcoholism” is this lack of impulse control manifested through alcohol, hence the practicality of calling this particular diagnosis “alcoholism”? Ignore me. I’m not a doctor.

#18. And still is, as of the writing of this footnote. Remember, the past-tense thing?

#19. I wish I could take credit for this word, but alas … I stole it from David Foster Wallace: “The doctor’s small nods were designed to appear not as responses but as invitations to continue, what Dretske called Momentumizers.” (Infinite Jest)*

Part 2

(Originally published on 7/19/2024)

#ComputerGames #MarioGolf #Autobiographical

Original Text

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Chapter III: The Glass That Broke Dionysus

“Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.” –Aristophanes. c. 450-385 BCE.

But I really shouldn’t.

From the beginning of human civilization, people have been getting totally wasted. Even the first recorded writers were boozing it up.^#20 It all started with the domestication of cereal grains, which led to the accidental creation of beer, which led to both beer and bread becoming some of the world’s first currencies,^#21 and eventually, this turned into a whole thing with beer and rum and wine and whisky and brandy becoming the currency to trade slaves with whilst also being rations to keep those very same slaves hydrated,^#22 and it kept the slave traders themselves hydrated too, no doubt, making the slave traders slaves in their own way (to alcohol). It’s no surprise that alcohol became so popular, as humans need water to survive at far greater urgency than they need food; as such, early human civilizations always popped up around rivers and lakes,^#23 but these waters were often unsafe to drink; so, booze was safer to imbibe than local water supplies; think about Oog’s sewage system, and then think about how he didn’t actually have a sewage system at all and instead just did his business in the nearby pond, and now think about drinking water out of that nearby Oog’s-business pond; considering this, if someone came up to you and said, “hey – check out this new drink, it’s not shit water and it tastes OK.” You are going to drink it, and on the plus side, it makes you feel a little silly and helps you forget about the wolf pack that keeps eating your chickens. And this is how alcohol came to control humanity.

According to Greek legend, Dionysus fled to Greece to escape beer-loving Mesopotamia, bringing with him delicious wine.^#24 Wine, unlike beer, had a far more pleasant taste and its purple hues exude an air of royalty. When wine popped up after the accidental fermentation of fruit juice, it became the drink above all other drinks. Wine was an instant hit. People loved wine; still do. I love wine. In fact, back then, people started to perceive beer as a lowly peasant drink while wine was elevated to The Sophisticate’s Beverage; and this perception still exists to this day, considering the default beverage at any modern formal adult-oriented event (that is not a backyard cookout) is typically wine. Back in ancient times, beer and watered-down swill wine were rationed out to workers,^#25 while the primo wines were hoarded by the upper class for both everyday drinking and massive parties; for example, the Greek symposiums, which were private men-only drinking parties where the mighty menfolk discussed such things as philosophy, the arts, and which combatant was going to get their head lopped off in the upcoming arena battle.^#26 It is not an exaggeration to say that wine was the lifeblood of Greece and Rome; and if these ancient peoples survived off wine, then surely so could I.

I told myself: Alcohol is basically humanity’s best friend – who am I to deny that bond? The entire adult-industrial complex runs on beer and wine. After dark, corporate culture becomes drinking culture. I am not above it. I’ll just have one glass with Jordan and Anders, then I’ll duck out.

That night’s symposium was a glass table fit for four that overlooked the neon downtown in such a way that we looked as if we were engulfed in mystic fire. Anders was there tapping away at a glowy screen^#27 between sips of brunette foam. As I took my seat, Jordan took a long look at me then said, “You wear an earring,” followed by one of those little “huh” sounds as if verbalizing a question mark; this was my second in-person interaction with the man, outside of him handing me a drink moments earlier.

(And, yes, I wear an earring; I have had a small white-gold hoop earring in my left ear for over sixteen years; in high school, I wanted so badly to look like Johnny Marr^#28 from The Smiths that I emulated his messy Beatles-esque haircut plus single-earring aesthetic to a tee [all the coolest 90s British bands were doing this]; of course, my mom wouldn’t let me get the piercing done professionally [Southern belle energy, low-key catholic], so I resorted to having a friend force a sewing needle through my iced lobe. I don’t remember it hurting too much. The point is, yes, I wear an earring: I like both how it looks and what it symbolizes: that being my youth plus the influences that molded me into who I am today, for better or for worse. Sometimes I take the earring out to avoid awkward conversations like the one with Jordan in the previous paragraph; but also because some clients don’t want a man who wears an earring to manage their business; but they won’t outright tell you that, instead they’ll just look at you as if mentally signing cross^#29 and snub you at every opportunity; this is more common of clients located in the deep American South, which is unfortunately where I live. This is what the corporate world does to you; it chips at your youth, chisels away your individuality so that it fits handsomely into a cheap suit. No one tells you to take out the earring; instead, you are subtly cajoled by an intangible-corporate-cultural milieu into adopting the standards of the majority; this is the “Company Culture” you hear so much about in job interviews and those mind-numbing all-hands meetings; it’s an unspoken tyranny of the majority.)

Jordan didn’t push the earring thing, probably because I could see his own pierced ear just missing the actual earring, so I figured he must have been a victim of the Company Culture too. I lifted that glass of red that Jordan so generously ordered for me and considered taking a sip. The symposium would be far more bearable if I just took a sip, I thought. In fact, wouldn’t it be offensive if I didn’t take a sip at all, considering Jordan bought the glass for me? But I knew what would happen if I drank that glass of wine: I. Would. Not. Stop. So I placed the glass down on the table and refocused my attention on Jordan and Anders, who were now early into a conversation about something having to do with balls – sports or whatever. I watched like a turtle out of its shell before Jordan turned to me and said something like, “Which team are you rooting for?” And I made the standard I-obviously-don’t-give-a-shit-about-any-of-this response of, “Well, I root for whichever team is winning at the time.” And this caused some laughter which may or may not have been genuine. Without drink, my mind’s eye was rolling faster than the rock after it had crushed Sisyphus and left him nothing more than a bloody impression on the mountain.

Within ten minutes, I was wishing for Mario Golf,^#30 then sleep. I started to formulate an escape plan, but before I could do anything, Anders and Jordan launched into the inane-small-talk lightning round: how’s Beckham doing from a support perspective; do you have any plans for the upcoming July 4th weekend; do you think they will renew their contract; do you play any sports; why not; do you think there’s an opportunity to sell them our new AI software; how are the kids doing; is the one-year-old talking yet; I bet your ten-year-old daughter is becoming a real handful; what do you like to do in your spare time; have you seen Ted Lasso^#31; isn’t it amazing; it’s really the best TV show ever; that Joe Biden is sure showing his age; the weather has been really weird lately; you don’t hear much about the war in Ukraine anymore; I let my sixteen-year-old drink sometimes but only at the house and only when I’m home to supervise; how about that Covid-19; what time are you getting up in the morning; why haven’t you touched your wine.

And of course, Anders repeated back every answer as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing, as is his nature. And doubly of course, I was bored out of my skull; barely responsive; “get me out of here” written all over my face; might as well have been wearing one of those THIS-IS-WHY-I-DRINK t-shirts.

*it’s true.

(I will be switching to present tense for the next few paragraphs.)

This is hard to explain, but I’m going to try my best. I do not fit in. I have never fit in. I barely even fit in with groups that hold similar interests to me, and this publication is proof of that: I tackle computer games like social and personal problems, and as a result, my writing largely doesn’t appeal to the group I find myself writing to, that being quote-unquote gamers. I don’t care about sports (other than tennis, which I still don’t care that much about), and I don’t have the attention span to learn enough about the balls or the teams or who won the game last night to carry on a conversation, because I have limited free time and I would rather spend that time doing something that I care about. I am unwaveringly in my zone and refuse to budge. I can’t even go to dinner with clients without being laughed at because my diet is such that I eat like a nine-year-old who always orders plain pasta. I am functional, but I have a number of minor quirks like the pasta-eating thing that make people tack on one of the following adjectives when referring to me: weird, eccentric, quirky, creepy, abnormal, peculiar, and sometimes (by older people, and out of earshot) queer. I realize this all sounds very high school, and the truth is I haven’t changed much since then. When I’m not with my kids, I spend my free time reading literature, taking notes, writing essays, listening to music while taking notes, occasionally playing computer games, and sometimes I’m just pacing around thinking about these things. You would think I could talk to my peers about my interests, but no; salespeople see these interests as running counter to The Grind. If a salesperson reads, they read something like QBQ! The Question Behind the Question by John G. Miller^#32; they don’t read I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki. If a salesperson listens to music, they listen to Tim McGraw, Guns ‘N’ Roses, and Queen (“We Will Rock You,” “We Are the Champions,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and maybe “Another One Bites the Dust”); they don’t listen to Fiona Apple, The Fall, and Pale Saints. If a salesperson plays computer games, it’s with their children between dinner and bedtime and only for thirty minutes because, to them, computer games are an unhealthy treat more akin to ice cream than broccoli. If a salesperson writes, it’s a business email with a bunch of jargon like “I’ll circle back with a touch base at the top of the hour once we have the bandwidth to support addressing these low-hanging fruits,” not a ten-thousand-word essay using the villain from Morrowind as an analogy for smartphones.33 I have nothing in common with my peers; and before you say it, I am not trying to hold myself on a pedestal above them – OK, well, maybe a little bit, but mostly not; my peers’ collective worldview produces positive outcomes for them, I recognize that; and my unorthodox worldview, coupled with my offbeat proclivities, has made socializing and even minor success more arduous than they need to be; and I do realize there are certainly those with much harder lives than myself; for example, anyone not born in a first-world country; in fact, you could only be like me if you were born in a first-world country to begin with, as anywhere else would beat the weird out of you early on. So yes, I am fully aware that I am privileged. I am fully aware that I am a bit of a navel-gazer, also. I can’t help it. I try to work within the framework handed down to me by a mixture of biology, split-custody parenting, Headmaster Ritual-like^#34 schooling, and one-summer-at-military-camp, run through a personality type consisting of unyielding contrarianism with a touch of bashfulness which creates a cognitive dissonance that settles itself somewhere between “I’m just going to fake it until I make it” and “Please kill me now.”

Adding another sprinkle of cognitive dissonance into the mixture, I can’t blame Jordan and Anders for being all about The Grind; and in some ways maybe they’re better off than I am for unflaggingly respecting it; they chase money to provide a better life for their families in the same way I do, but they don’t hate themselves for it; they see The Grind as Just How It Is, Man. I, too, see The Grind as Just How It Is, Man, but also that it doesn’t have to be this way and surely there is more to life than this. The problem is, I think too much; and it’s not a good thing. People will often try to put a positive spin on overthinking by saying something like, “Thinking too much is a superpower!” But thinking too much is not a superpower when you’re thinking yourself off a balcony. Thinking too much is not a superpower when you think yourself into repressing your identity and, as a result, no one truly understands you, not even your own family, because you can’t open up to anyone outside of writing long run-on paragraphs about your cosmic angst on the internet.

I just can’t get over myself. I’ve tried. The fact that I considered deleting this entire section because it might make me seem like an egomaniacal sociopath yet decided to leave it uncut is further proof that I just can’t get over myself. I have never belonged, and it’s my own damn fault. I have especially never belonged in the corporate world. I’m the antithesis of corporate. I hate corporate, yet I am corporate. I am a cog in the machine of my own ruin. I perpetuate my own despair. Steven Brag thinks I should quit my job, maybe he’s right.

(I am now switching back to past tense.)

So, when I raised that purple alchemy to my lips and the pungent redolence of every good time I’ve ever had whilst wasted wafted through my nostrils, how could I resist? I could make the cosmic angst go away. All I needed was one glass of ancient grapes, and I would return to my rightful place in the Software Pantheon: Dionysus.

That velvety serum spilled down my throat, coating my stomach in a thin layer of viscous violet. I took another sip; and another; and another; and another. Soon I was on my second glass. Jordan was buying. I remember his laughter. I remember bonding over tennis, coworker gossip, and the fantasy of the perfect father-son relationship; and we talked about all this for some time. Jordan said many times, “Hey – you know, despite that earring, you’re not so bad!” I remember there was a shared plate of french fries that was accidentally drenched in wine, so we ordered another plate. More laughs. At some point, I got up from the symposium and demanded a cigarette from a nearby group of young men, a cigarette that they, apparently, did not have, but I insisted that they did; “Just look at you guys, one of you has to have a cigarette – don’t tell me you all vape!” And their responses were less than kind. More laughter. Nothing mattered. Dionysus was on the rooftop.

When I returned to the symposium, literally amongst the clouds, toasting my glass of cabernet to the neon below, cigaretteless and unfettered and nearly falling over, there was a shot of tequila waiting there for me. The Software Pantheon then took a round of shots; and another; and another; and another. And the next thing I remember was that cognitive trickery when you stare at someone’s face while upside down and your brain tries to make sense of the upside-down face but only ends up morphing it into something out of a bad shrooms trip. I remember being scared. I remember saying something like, “I gotta go back to my room now – anyone know my room number?” I remember panicking. And then nothing.

That’s it – that’s all I remember.

Chapter IV: Blackout

“Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.” –“On the Orator”. Book by Marcus Tullius Cicero, I. 5, 55 BCE.

I want to use this chapter to take a break from the story and reflect on what’s happened so far. I also want to cover some scientifical and philosophical details about the number one human pastime: drinking alcohol.

There are two types of alcohol-induced blackouts. The first is called a “fragmentary blackout,” commonly referred to as a “brownout” and sometimes as a “grayout.” A person is considered to have experienced a brownout when they can recall some events from a night of drunken partying, but not all the events; a person may be prompted to remember the missing bits by verbal and situational cues. The second type of alcohol-induced blackout is referred to as an “en block blackout”; this is a true blackout in which the person experiencing the blackout cannot remember what happened during the period of intoxication and no amount of prompting can remind them. A true blackout results in permanent memory loss. Those under the effects of either type of blackout are not necessarily incapacitated; they may appear to be functional and able to complete complex tasks, they simply won’t remember doing those complex tasks. The science is still out on the exact mechanics at play here, although the general consensus is that when a person raises their alcohol level too high within a small window of time, it effectively shuts down their hippocampus, which is the region of the brain that turns short-term memories into long-term memories. However, the amount of alcohol needed for this to happen varies from person to person and can be hastened by others factors such as medication, weight, exhaustion, overheating, and lack of sleep.^#35

Forget about the physical implications of this for a second; let’s consider the philosophical stuff instead. Philosophically, alcohol-induced blackouts are tree-falls-in-the-woods levels of weird. Schrodinger’s alcoholic: If you blacked out but there were no witnesses, did you actually exist at all during that period? You could have killed someone and hidden the body really well, but you will never know unless a police officer shows up at your door: “We found the body; it has your DNA all over it.” Pretend, for a moment, that you died and no one remembered you – did you exist at all? And if you did, what would have been the point if no one remembered? Memory is one of the few things we rely on for a sense of permanence; this is partly why conditions like Alzheimer’s and anterograde amnesia are so tragic.^#36 We value a sense of continuity, and this continuity breaks when memories go missing. When we choose to drink alcohol, we willingly submit ourselves to this paradoxical missing-memory flux, the only question is: why? My slight cheekiness belies a deadly seriousness, because this is spooky stuff. If this paradoxical state of maybe-happened-maybe-not doesn’t stop someone from drinking alcohol, I have no idea what will.

But enough about the philosophical stuff, maybe you don’t care about all that and think it’s a bit eggheaded, and that’s fine. Instead, let’s talk about how alcohol impacts the sense of self and how that impacted sense of self is especially dangerous when coupled with the possibility of a blackout.

It’s said that alcohol brings out a person’s true self, but I have never subscribed to this line of thinking in a strict sense (and I’m aware that this could very well be motivated reasoning due to my possible alcoholism, but bear with me). When someone says that alcohol brings out a person’s true self, they mean something like, “you got drunk then flirted with that guy because you want to fuck that guy,” and then they draw the conclusion of “and because you want to fuck that guy, you don’t love me”; therefore, alcohol has brought out this hypothetical partner’s true self: the whore of Babylon who only wants to sleep around and is not capable of loving anyone except themselves. However, I posit that this “wanting to sleep around” just exists inside all of us by default, and when we are in our right mind, we can reason it away with logic and all-around good sense; consider this line of thinking, “I do find Person B attractive, but I am in a committed relationship with Person A whom I like very much; therefore, I will not sleep with Person B because it will damage the relationship with Person A.” I would then posit that anyone who finds this line of thinking faulty is a liar who is not ready to have honest conversations about what’s going on inside themselves.

What I’m trying to say is: there exists within us this ancestral being, let’s call him^#37 Oog, that wants to fuck and fight, but our higher cognitive ability can reason Oog back into his cave. We, as humans, have a higher cognitive ability than non-human animals,^#38 and this higher cognitive ability erects barriers around the Ancestral Oog. These barriers are based on both hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary biology and everyday learned experience; these barriers then form the basis of our individual personalities; not only our outward persona, but our inward ego too. So, if alcohol brings out the “true self,” then what it’s really doing, according to my possibly total bullshit theory, is tearing down the barriers that keep the Ancestral Oog in his cave. If the lesson then is, “all true self is Ancestral Oog,” then I would follow-up with this question: Is our true self defined by the primal urges we fantasize about in our minds, or by the personae we construct and strictly adhere to throughout our entire lives?

If we can agree that alcohol brings out the Ancestral Oog, then we can agree that alcohol is dangerous; and if we couple this with the fact that alcohol can turn off your memories whilst also bringing out Ancestral Ogg, then we can concede that alcohol is very dangerous; and if we concede that alcohol can do all of this whilst also being physically and psychologically addictive,^#39 manipulating a person to think about consuming alcohol and giving them the violent shakes whenever they are alcoholless, then we can concede that alcohol is very very dangerous indeed.

But, Dionysus doesn’t care about any of this. “I am not manipulated by liquids.” Dionysus tells himself.

Chapter V: The Morning After

“I have never blacked out. That’s what I told myself.” –Me (the author). Two chapters ago.

I woke to a blaring WOO-HOO! Mind swirling, lamp flickering, skin crawling, sheets drenched, head throbbing, and my hands were damp and sticky. I spun myself into an intricate web of white linens as I flailed my hands, searching for the source of Blur’s “Song 2,”^#40 which happened to be my phone’s ringtone; Graham Coxon’s rhythmic strumming and that fuzzy bass tone, mixed with the flashing lamp, were driving my headache to levels of living hell that I had not known existed; every note was a wince; every time Damon Albarn opened his very British mouth, I, too, opened my mouth: to scream expletives. I soon realized that the noise was coming from the dresser on the opposite side of the room,^#41 so I rolled myself out of bed onto my knees and crawled to the source. I must have looked like a Roman who had one too many glasses of wine at the symposium and accidentally crawled into a time portal leading to a rock concert in a seedy British pub because I was completely nude besides some linens loosely wrapped around my lower half like a makeshift toga. The lamp continued to flicker. My head continued to pound.

After crawling my way to the dresser, I slung my hand over the top, fruitlessly patting around for my phone until I forced myself to my feet to pick up the thing. I answered with a gruuhgg that sounded like hello in my mind, and I was greeted with a “Rough night last night?” It was Jordan: “I called you like ten times. You’re lucky we didn’t leave without you. Get your ass down here.” I could hear faint laughter behind the static. I said something that sounded like “Yeah, be right there” before dropping the call almost as fast as my stomach dropped.

My entire gastrointestinal tract tied itself into a constrictor knot in real time; every pull of my intestines, every twist of my stomach: felt. I deadeyed the wall as my insides rearranged themselves and I was overcome by the horror that everything was my fault. History was repeating itself: I had gotten wasted, overslept, and was going to be late for the Beckham Golf Charity Event, again.

Pushing through the horror, I resolved myself to take the blame for The Software Pantheon’s collective golf tardiness. I had never been one to lie about my behavior, and there was no opportunity to do so considering Jordan and Anders were both witnesses to my Dionysian ritual madness.

*death and his brother blackout.

Knowing that I had little time to get ready, I swiftly approached my suitcase and removed a pair of khaki shorts, some socks, and a white aloha shirt dotted with an almost-psychedelic flower pattern. Before throwing the shirt on, I relocated to the bathroom and took a look at myself in the mirror; I looked fine besides messy hair, purple lips, and sleep-crusted eyes, which I hastily fixed before brushing my teeth and gargling mouthwash. Then I noticed that the standing shower was wet and there was a goopy darkness with chunks clogging the drain, but I could not remember taking a shower the night before; and the goop: was that vomit? I threw my shirt on then headed back into the main room. I inspected the flickering lamp, the switch was in a not-fully-pressed position, and fixing that fixed the flickering, but I noticed the hard-paper lampshade was ripped and dented: was the lampshade always like this? I turned to the bed and saw streaks of purple across the sheets and mattress; I reached out to touch the streaks, to see if they could be rubbed off, but they were stained and would not even smear: was this wine? As I explored the room further, I noticed several out-of-place oddities that could not be explained: my laptop was flipped over on the small hotel desk, the mouse was missing, cards from my wallet were scattered all over the floor, the hotel mini-fridge was ajar and empty, a dry towel was draped over the flat-screen television, the television itself was tuned to a dead channel, faint purple handprints were all over the walls, and a half-eaten granola bar was on the floor near the trash can.

Surely, I was the cause of all these things, but how come I couldn’t remember any of it? Did I black out? But I have never blacked out before. How did I even get to my room last night? I remembered not knowing my room number, so who helped me into my room? Did that person enter the room with me? Did that person damage the lampshade? Did I get into a fight with that person? But I didn’t have any visible injuries. Was it a woman from the bar? Did I cheat on my wife? Did I call my wife? Maybe my wife gave me my room number? That must have been it; I must have called my wife; she must have given me the room number and then helped me get to my room.

I wanted to prove the wife theory, so I checked my phone’s call log and saw that several calls were made to my wife around 1 AM, but she didn’t answer any of them. I then opened Signal (our preferred messaging app) and found two video messages that I had sent to her: The first featured an incredibly trashed version of myself panicking about my forgotten room number: “How am I going to get back to my room? I don’t know where I am. Should I go to the front desk? Babe, are you there?” And the second was sent twenty minutes after the first; in the second recording, I could tell I was in my hotel room by the pattern on the wallpaper in the background, and I was rambling on and on about wanting to talk to someone while complaining about how sick I felt, all barely comprehensible. There was only a single message after the final video, it was from my wife: “You need to get some sleep. I hope you feel better in the morning. I love you.”

I still don’t know how I got back to my room that night, or how I’m not divorced yet.

My wife must have been worried sick; not to mention all the other times that I had done this to her. I thought of how she must have worried about me all those nights, out late on business trips, getting near blackout drunk (but never having blacked out before!) and all the possible trouble I could have been getting into – legal, romantic, or otherwise – only this time, I couldn’t remember if I had gotten into any legal-romantic-or-otherwise trouble at all. What if her fears came true? How would I even know?

I attempted to puzzle out the remainder of my drunken night with the accidental clues left behind by my stupid self, but the trail grew cold and I was forced to come to grips with the fact that I had blacked out. But I didn’t want to believe it. I had never blacked out before. I had told myself that I was immune. I had told myself that I was Dionysus.

But gods don’t black out, do they?

Part 3

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Footnotes:

#20. This isn’t a stretch, considering that the first writings were recorded in Uruk (modern-day Iraq) and date back to the 4th millennium BCE and that by the beginning of the 4th millennium BCE, wine and beer were produced in many locations in Mesopotamia.

ThoughtCo. (n.d.). History of alcohol: A timeline. Retrieved July 18, 2024, from https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-alcohol-a-timeline-170889

#21. I’m quoting the full paragraph here for the historical context, not because the passage is particularly well written or “awesome” (as the author of the article might put it) but because I want to rag on it a little bit: “As this approximately 5,000-year-old clay tablet shows, workers in ancient Mesopotamia were actually paid for their toil in daily beer rations – a form of remuneration which seems pretty awesome when you first think about it… and then just keeps on staying awesome the longer you think about it.”

I’m not sure how “awesome” getting paid in beer would be now that I think about it, considering beer slows you down and makes your work suffer; plus, as a natural diuretic, you’d be peeing all the time and might quickly become dehydrated; plus plus, I’m not sure I’d like to be out in sweltering heat with a buzz pissing all the time; the thought of that alone makes me uncomfortable. So, “beer rations” and “beer currency” were probably not awesome at all.

ScienceAlert. “This 5,000-Year-Old Clay Tablet Shows Ancient Mesopotamians Were Paid for Work in Beer.” ScienceAlert, 18 June 2020, www.sciencealert.com/this-5-000-year-old-clay-tablet-shows-ancient-mesopotamians-were-paid-for-work-in-beer.

#22. Strange, isn’t it? A whole market of slave-made rum in which that slave-made rum is then used to trade for more slaves to make more slave-made rum. Nonsensical, almost. (I’m sure some of that rum was used for other trades/purchases, which makes a little more sense.)

Got Rum?. “The Dark Side of Rum.” “Got Rum?”, https://www.gotrum.com/the-rum-university/rum-in-history/the-dark-side-of-rum/.

#23. All animals need water. Makes sense to build your mud hut near a lake or a river. All the biggest mud-hut fans were doing it, eventually forming mud-hut communities, which eventually formed mud-hut towns, mud-hut cities, mud-hut kingdoms. This all happened in an area now called “The Cradle of Civilization,” or modern-day Iraq roundabout.

Lumen Learning. “River Valley Civilizations.” “World Civilization”. SUNY, courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldcivilization/chapter/river-valley-civilizations/.

#24. The class-based associations surrounding beer and wine have existed since ancient times, and this short mythological story illustrates this long association. When Greece, and eventually Rome, emerged, Mesopotamia had a reputation for being a land full of barbarians, and since the preferred drink of Mesopotamia was beer, beer was associated with barbarians. As such, Dionysus fled Mesopotamia to escape the beer-loving barbarians and settled in Greece (and eventually Rome), bringing with him delicious, civilized wine. This association persisted through time, with wine typically being the focal beverage of formal dinners, banquets, weddings, galas, balls, etc., while beer is typically served at sporting events, barbecues, tailgate parties, and Lollapalooza. (Preemptive possible-total-bullshit warning.) Beer may have morphed into its standard can variety due to that mode of liquid transport being conducive to portability, adapting to the wild nature of the events at which it is served; whereas wine has (typically) stayed in a stemmed glass for careful sipping while sitting amidst something very fancy (or something).

“Chemistry in the Ancient World: A Brief History.” “Chemical & Engineering News”, vol. 10, no. 12, 2004, pp. 12-16. American Chemical Society, https://pubsapp.acs.org/subscribe/archive/tcaw/10/i12/html/12chemchron.html.

#25. Similar to [21], wine was frequently used as rations in the ancient world, especially in ancient Rome. There were many types of rationed wine, with most lower class people receiving watered-down swill wine; one such diluted variant was called “posca,” which was a blend of water and nearly-vinegar wine; less acidic than vinegar, it still retained some of the wine’s aroma and texture. Additionally, there is written record of Marcus Porcius Cato (or Cato the Censor or Cato the Elder, Roman senator, 234–149 BC) suggesting that slaves should receive a weekly ration of 5 liters of posca, so there is a substantial historical record of wine being used as a ration for both citizens and slaves.

Standage, Tom. “A History of the World in 6 Glasses”. Walker & Company, 2005.

Phillips, R. “A Short History of Wine”. HarperCollins, 2000, pp. 35-45. ISBN 0-06-621282-0.

#26. A symposium (sometimes “sympsion” or “symposia”) was indeed a men-only drinking party in Greece, typically taking place after a big meal. I had this idea to draw a comparison between symposiums and corporate drinking culture, the latter of which is heavily male-dominated, just as the former was. Corporate drinking culture is interesting in that women aren’t outright discouraged from participating, but women who choose to join “the boys” at the bar after working hours are typically looked down upon as loose women, the logic being, “What woman in her right mind would want to be surrounded by a bunch of drunk dudes?” This standard, of course, does not go both ways, as men who surround themselves with a lot of women are often lauded and held on a pedestal by other men. I’m sure there is something in here about “the patriarchy” and men’s unbalanced influence over history and culture (and how this is still happening to this day in sometimes equally overt ways), but that is the subject of another essay (an essay that I am not qualified to write). One could draw a comparison between golf and a symposium as well, as golf is a heavily male-dominated sport with a focus on “getting away from the wife and kids to drink on the green with the boys.” Add in the fact that old-school (and very politically incorrect) golfers consider tee boxes closer to the hole “ladies tee boxes,” and you have the whole gamut of misogyny at play (this “ladies tee box” is covered in the last chapter of this essay).

For more information on symposiums:

“Symposium.” “World History Encyclopedia”, World History Foundation, https://www.worldhistory.org/Symposium/

#27. The year is 2024 and everyone is literally looking at phones, myself included. You, reader, probably looked at your phone within the last 5 minutes; you might even be reading this on your phone. I could write a whole ten-chapter essay on phones (see [33]) and how they’re ruining our attention spans and how even though phones have given us an accessible wealth of knowledge right in our pockets we are more stupid than ever before and how The National Safety Council reports that cell phone use while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes each year and how phones nowadays seem designed in such a way that babies as young as 8 months old can figure out how to swipe left and right and access YouTube and how parents are just giving children unfettered access to phones which is exposing kids to radical echo chambers thereby ensuring an early descent into partisan hackery and how work-life balance has been entirely eroded by the fact that clients/managers can just call you on your phone while you’re at the beach on a weekend. I could keep going, but I am going to leave it alone for now.

#28. This is it; you can’t get Cooler than this.

#29. The sign of the cross (sometimes called “blessing oneself” or “crossing oneself”) is a common “ritual blessing” hand gesture resembling a cross that old-school Christians do when they see something or someone that does not conform with their narrow worldview. Black clothing? Sign of the cross. Man with earrings? Sign of the cross. Baby out of wedlock? Sign of the cross. Women showing ankle? Sign of the cross. Someone uses the word “crap.” Sign of the cross. Two women holding hands? Sign of the cross. Using proper terms for anatomy instead of stuff like “dinky” and “wee wee.” Sign of the cross. (Note that they won’t sign the cross when someone pretends to eat the corpse or drink the blood of some long-dead guy.)

#30. You almost forgot, didn’t you?

#31. I have not seen Ted Lasso; my contrarian bones will not allow me to watch it due to the superabundance of praise it gets from corporate goons and other people whose personalities are just polo shirts and self-help seminars. I’ve been on corporate calls where scenes or images from Ted Lasso are incorporated into the presentations; there’s always some sort of super deep life/business/leadership lesson that Ted Lasso can impart unto you according to these guys, but it’s always some real basic stuff like “Ted makes a lot of mistakes but doesn’t dwell on the past” and “Ted is always moving forward” and “Courage isn’t fearlessness – it’s doing the things even when you’re afraid!” Ted Lasso is the type of show that sports dads let their young kids watch and spin it as a mature growing-up moment, as if 29 to 30-minute episodes of a television show can impart some grand wisdom on their children so that they (the parents) don’t have to; “Now son, this show is a little mature but I think you’re ready for it and I want you to pay close attention when Ted loses the game here.” I just can’t with Ted Lasso. Maybe it’s good, but I’ll never know. Why am I like this?

#32. This is a super specific example, isn’t it? The reason it’s included is because this book was required reading at the company I worked for when writing this. The book is very much like Ted Lasso in that it’s all basic life lessons about personal responsibility, stuff like “stop blaming everyone around you – take action instead” and “ask better questions like ‘what can I do to make this better’ instead of ‘who dropped the ball here?’” etc. etc. I actually read this entire book in one sitting (not impressive, it’s like 70 pages); it wasn’t offensive but I didn’t get much from it. I did leave one note on the author’s claim that “stress is a choice”; my note was (is): “This is true maybe 20% of the time – chemicals exist in the brain.”

#33. See: Gods Among Men and Mer or: SOTHA SIL IS DEAD

#34. “The Headmaster Ritual” is the opening track of The Smiths 1985 album Meat Is Murder. The lyrics are about the belligerent abusive ghouls that run Manchester schools. English pop star Kirsty Macoll has described the song as “probably one of the best songs about being at school that I’ve ever heard.” Trying to describe the song’s greatness would not do it justice, just listen to it here.

#35. All the information in this paragraph is captured within the following source:

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (n.d.). Interrupted memories: Alcohol-induced blackouts. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sheets/interrupted-memories-alcohol-induced-blackouts

#36. Alzheimer’s disease is a neurological disorder causing brain cells to degenerate, leading to a gradual decline in mental faculties, including the retention of memories and the ability to process information. Those impacted typically cannot function without supervision, and they will eventually forget the name of the person supervising them, which is tragic for both parties. Anterograde amnesia (or “Transient Global Amnesia”) is a special kind of memory loss where you can’t make new memories after the condition starts. You remember everything from before the amnesia kicked in, but anything new slips away almost immediately. This can happen because of brain injuries, illnesses, or even certain drugs, and it’s sometimes seen in late-stage Alzheimer’s disease.

Mayo Clinic Proceedings. “Relationship between Coffee Drinking and Risk of Colorectal Cancer: A Meta-analysis.” Mayo Clinic Proceedings, vol. 89, no. 10, 2014, pp. 1370-1381, https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(14)01077-5/fulltext

Mayo Clinic Staff. “Alzheimer’s Disease.” Mayo Clinic, Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 6 July 2023, www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alzheimers-disease/symptoms-causes/syc-20350447

#37. The use of “he/him” pronouns for Oog is deliberate (and kind of cheeky); I will let you draw your own conclusions on that.

#38. The fact that I’m writing this piece shows that I have a higher cognitive ability than a pig (for example). The reason this footnote exists, however, is for me to go on a tangent about animal suffering; or, at least, direct you to a tangent about animal suffering that I wrote almost a year before writing this piece. Some (humans) use this humans-are-more-intelligent-than-other-animals thing as a way to handwave the suffering of animals they see as “lesser” than them, mostly in an effort to justify the hotdog they’re stuffing down their throats; however, it does not follow that because we are smarter than other animals we should be able to harm other animals; it does follow, however, that we ought to use our higher intellect to minimize the suffering of animals, both human and non-human, because we are the most well-equipped to do so.

#39. People often overlook the physically addictive qualities of alcohol; long-term heavy drinking can make the body crave alcohol, as the body becomes accustomed to it, and if the drinker suddenly stops, they may experience shaking, nausea, profuse sweats and, in extreme cases, shock and/or death. Personally, I have never experienced these physical symptoms, probably because I have never imbibed enough for my body to become fully dependent on alcohol, but I have experienced the psychological recursive alcohol loops that produce endless justifications for drinking and the negative mood shifts that come with missing the habitual nightly drinks.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (n.d.-b). The cycle of alcohol addiction. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/cycle-alcohol-addiction

#40. “Song 2” starts with a four-bar drum loop that bursts into a hurricane of fuzz after Damon Albarn (singer/frontman of Blur) screams “WOO-HOO!”; reminiscent of American alternative rock of the 90s; the song is instantly memorable, alarming, and iconic; arguably Blur’s biggest hit, at least in the States. Many people in the U.S. only know Blur by this song and not their other huge U.K. hits such as “Girls & Boys,” “Beetlebum,” “Parklife,” “Popscene” (one of my personal favorites), and “Coffee & TV” (another favorite). “Song 2” sounds almost like an entirely different band when compared with Blur’s other work, the latter of which can only be described as some the most British music I have ever heard complete with pinky-finger-raising tea cups, bowler caps, cricket, Monty Python, running out of bog roll at the local pub, and fish and chips. One of the reasons for “Song 2” sounding so different is that, according to Graham Coxon (lead guitarist), the song was intended to be a prank on their record label who demanded a palatable U.S. single, so Blur wrote “a hit” in the form of a grunge parody that ended up being a true hit within the community they were parodying. Listen to the song here.

#41. I’m sure others do this too, but just as some added context: I place my phone away from the bed so that it’s out of arm’s length when I need to wake up early the next morning; this forces me to get out of bed to turn the alarm off, and the extra step of getting out of bed seems to help keep me out of bed. I only do this when the occasion is important, like the Beckham Golf Charity Event (obviously).

Part 3

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(Originally published on 7/19/2024)

#ComputerGames #MarioGolf #Autobiographical