A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
Since infancy, mankind has displayed an irrepressible proclivity to seek intoxication.
Humans simply will not be deterred. We’ve fermented grapes and grains, chewed strange buds, torched wild weeds and gleaned all sorts of useful scientific knowledge from the theory and practice of evading, if only for a little while, the intrinsic angst of the cosmic cycle of life and death, by means of ingesting substances that alter our consciousness.
Oddly, also from the very start, we’ve balanced our blood alcohol counts with vivid cautionary accounts, beginning with the oral tradition, and only later through emerging written languages. Consequently, the Western literary canon is filled with stories about sodden inebriates doomed to oblivion – a place where we’re all headed, anyway, but stick with me for a moment.
It seems almost as if the “officially” accepted rules of fiction permit only random moments of intelligence, heroism or Falstaffian levity in drinkers, while in the main, they’re not permitted to be humorous or sympathetic without extensive qualification. They’re commonly cast not as people, but as walking, talking and sometimes gurgling morality plays.
Imbibers are car-crashing, fight-starting, self-immolating accidents waiting to happen, and those who are well adjusted and functional seldom fit snugly into any serious narrative. At best, they are allowed to wax and wane in deference to tragicomedy, a device primarily deployed as foreshadowing in advance of their subsequent denouement as self-destructive, innocence-shattering villains.
To summarize, not unlike the fate of the Consul on Mezcal in Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” their tales always end badly, and as a professional drinker of many years standing, with a gold-plated union card and squealing liver to prove it, I find the repetition thoroughly tiresome.
Not that I am willing to argue against the varied and exhaustively documented costs of alcoholism. Rather, while negative considerations are genuine, I contend they are not to be confused with the myriad and conducive joys of social drinking, both educationally and recreationally.
And, quite frankly, also for medicinal reasons.
For instance, consider the city of New Albany. There are times when this place seems so bizarrely unreal that only fiction lubricated with alcoholic beverages can properly capture the sensation.
As in: Lately.
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If the newspaper had a sense of humor (rest assured, it doesn’t), the banner headline would have read something like this: “End of rainbow discovered near Hauss Square as history comes to dead stop.”
A full two centuries down the line, New Albany abruptly rose from a slumber of Rip Van Winkle dimensions to find itself slouching, perhaps hungover, at a juncture long anticipated, sometimes predicted, generally dismissed, and often doubted by the very civic leaders who now have determined that we really do have all the money we need.
Imagine it!
Suddenly, after all those wasted years of miserly and penurious parsimony, forever lashed by the imminent tightening of ropes (heck, we couldn’t even afford actual belts), now petty cash is as common as litter on city streets bearing names but no trash receptacles. Verily, either Switzerland or Dubai lies within easy reach, maybe even Singapore, and all we need do to attain the brass ring is float a bond, build some parks, and kick back to watch our children win athletic scholarships and leave town, never to return.
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After last Thursday’s council meeting, when a resolution was approved to speed New Albany toward nirvana or a $19+ million bond issue for parks and recreation (whichever comes first), I was chatting with Councilman Scott Blair about prospective two-way street conversions. His very first question was to ask if any of us knew how much it would cost, because he’s a cost benefit analysis kind of guy.
CM Blair also counts himself firmly among those who advance parks and recreation as “no brainer” quality-of-life issues, and while I personally don’t entirely disagree with this point of view, it seems to me that “quality of life” as a consideration surely must embrace other aspects of the human experience beyond organized recreational facilities.
Even interpreted narrowly, as a concept pertaining solely to recreation, quality of life certainly includes an ability to use the entire city as potential playground, in the sense of walking, riding bicycles or eating a sandwich on a streetside bench … alas, with no garbage can nearby. Hence, the under-valued importance of the municipal street grid itself, because just as the skin is your body’s largest organ, a city’s streets tie every single one of its other facets together into a whole.
That’s why I found it noteworthy that CM Blair, a skilled and respected banker, immediately pounced on the notion of two-way street conversions as a prime candidate for rigorous cost-benefit analysis (and indeed, numerous studies have been conducted, here and elsewhere), while accepting virtually without question the aquatics center-as-quality-of-life truism.
With virtually all in attendance advancing the notion of recreational facilities as sole determining factor governing whether “our children” become taxpayers or axe murderers, and largely refusing to countenance arguments of a more subtle nature suggesting otherwise, exactly how do we reduce such an equation to dollars and cents and cost-benefit – apart from guesstimates of attendance and user fees worth somewhat less than the PowerPoint they’re printed on?
It isn’t my intention to “bully” CM Blair, who’s quite capable of advancing his viewpoint and has done so with me on several occasions. We talk just fine, Daniel. Rather, it’s to explicate yet again (sadly) this default tendency of power brokers to lapse into stupor at the very suggestion that prioritizing basic everyday infrastructures of living, from transport to design to neighborhood structure, might address “quality-of-life” issues far more fundamentally and comprehensively than parks and recreation facilities created (and financed) in isolated, self-perpetuating vacuums.
Two hundred years after the Scribners rowed ashore to take a leak and get some good ol’ homebrew cooking, the Gahan administration evidently has found the pot of gold buried beneath the manhole covers out back in the street department’s parts shed. Not only that, there’s a council mercifully absent Li’l Stevie and King Larry, and with an alien occupying the body formerly known as Dan Coffey’s, and what this adds up to is a majority seemingly in favor of spending the uncovered loot as quickly as possible.
So be it. I’m for borrowing every last cent if it means making this city a better place, and one that requires less personal alcohol consumption to make life tolerable (but please, keep drinking Progressive Pints, because daddy likes to get paid).
All I’m asking is for a closer look at “quality of life” and what it entails, and with less rolling of eyes, particularly as the concept pertains to the majority of residents who neither do the backstroke nor swat horsehide. Make this whole damned city a recreational area, guys -- and then we’re getting somewhere.
Now if you’ll slide that bottle across the table, we can get back to nationalizing the railroad.
