About getting sober and becoming boring

Cary Tennis over at Salon wrote a very beautiful essay response to a question a girl had about a friend of hers, who after sobering up became very boring. I love Cary Tennis, because he is quietly thoughtful and you can sense what a considerate and caring person he is though his writing. Here is a condensed version:

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About getting sober and becoming boring. I, too, got sober and became boring.

So let's begin with the tyranny of having to appear interesting. No, let's begin in a bar screaming.

Here is a story about how much fun I was when I was drinking.

Sitting at the bar with my friend, I just found myself really getting into this note, this tone. And, being an enthusiastic person who, in his art, in his music, in his writing, had found that there is always a little more in the tank if you push just a bit, having found that repetition of a riff can sometimes push you into new territory, being in many cases therefore the last guy standing, the last guy jamming, the last guy drinking, the last guy in front of the stage applauding, the last guy writing, the last guy eating, the last guy still outside the club waiting for the fun to start, it was my nature to keep screaming.

So there I was sitting at the bar screaming. I had my eyes closed and could feel the little head bones vibrate.

It must have been very loud, now that I think about it. There were other people in the bar. And there was a bartender. Also, I think if I had died then, you would have found cocaine. Cocaine had this way of increasing one's enthusiasm for the moment. So you have cocaine-induced increased enthusiasm for the moment however dumb, plus you have alcohol-induced decreased sensitivity to the disapproval of others and to the dictates of whatever might be left of your own "conscience," and you have a guy sitting at the bar yelling one long, sustained note of dubious beauty and purity.

So I was 86-ed, summarily and firmly, to my immense surprise and chagrin and shame.

I couldn't go in there for quite a while. But then, I could always go to Murio's. And Murio's was where I had my last drinks, almost 20 years ago, and Murio's was where this very same friend who had been with me in my time of screaming told me, after I had been sober a few weeks, "You were so much more fun when you were drinking."

So today I say to all the fellow brilliant drunks out there, those of us who spent our early years entertaining those not quite so brilliant as us, those with not so much leftover life to burn, with not so much surplus to waste in clubs and bars: Get boring!

I, like your friend, was an impressive drunk. I could take it farther than anyone else and then, precociously, I could come back from it in an instant! I could snap out of it. I could snap out of it until one day and then on a succession of days I discovered that not only could I not snap out of it but I couldn't even crawl out of it on my hands and knees. So I became in that moment willing to be the most boring, cardigan-wearing, Mister Rogers, unhip, wide-eyed, home-by-9 and up by 6, teetotaling, pop-culture-ignorant, regular Joe ignoramus on the planet if only I could go through one day without losing my mind and shaming myself and killing myself with this compulsion to drink and take drugs and get thrown out of places.

I will be boring like your friend. I will be boring because I contain infinity. I must contain infinity because if I do not it will destroy me.

So here is what you have to do with people like me who used to be a ton of laughs and then got sober and boring. You have to hang around us and dig us and look for the glimmer. The glimmer is there. It's just reeled in.

We learn to reel it in because when you're on display like she was, you're spending it all for nothing. You're performing for free for a tiny audience. Nobody's giving you grants for your sculpture. You're flinging ideas into the ether to the applause of maybe three. You're famous to your friends but your friends aren't commissioning any works or giving you an advance. So you reel it in.

I crave your attention but I can't do the old strip-tease for free. I have to be the boring one in the crowd of loud laughter or go down screaming to an early grave. I'll live with that. I'm in it for the long haul now. Survival is my trump card. Survival breaks scissors, cuts paper, covers rock. My premature death lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, however amusing it might sound over Jameson and darts.

So this is it from me to you on this day: We get sober and become boring because our brilliance deserves to live. Our brilliance deserves to be cared for. Because however brilliant we are at 22, not many of us are Picassos. Not many of us know what the heck we're doing right off the bat. We take time to condition our gift. We take decades. We take decades to learn not only the business of surviving as artists but the business of our own hearts. We are so often wrong about ourselves in the early years. Especially those of us who are really smart and really talented and perhaps even known as precocious: We take decades to figure out what is our gift, and then to find the perfect gig for our perfect gift is a rare find indeed, and much sought after by others with comparable gifts and perhaps certain strategic advantages we had not reckoned on such as irresistible personal charm and great family wealth and a slaying kind of loveliness. So we play the odds and we struggle. We keep at it, my friend. We trudge along. We get boring and we get therapy and we keep trudging along. We learn about money because if you're a brilliant weirdo in this world you'd better find a patron or build a business and stick close to those who respect your talent. And you'd better give it everything you've got, which sometimes means making it an early evening and getting up at dawn the next day to give it another shot because as good as you are there are thousands of people who could take your place and would if given the chance.

So I applaud your friend. I applaud her first of all because she's survived. I applaud her because she's husbanding her resources. She's caring for herself. She's living to fight another day.

And to you, my precocious, amusing and perplexed lucky friend, I say cherish her. Stick with her. Listen for the glimmer.