Adventures of a Beer Boy

“Oh, to be young and drunk and twenty,” Thomas Wolfe chanted onto the roll of newsprint he wrote on atop  his refrigerator, as befits a six-eight  writer of gargantuan talent and ambition.

I went that route hard from my 17^th birthday for more than twenty mostly beer-fueled years of angst and insanity that landed me in the hospital on several occasions and into the lockup for drunk and drunk and disorderly eight different times. I was a stupid and belligerent drunk who mainly got what was coming to me and what I richly deserved even in those more generally drunken times. Alcoholism wasn’t thought of as a disease then. It just was. Still is.

Which brings us to Brett Kavanaugh. When you watch a trainwreck like his on Thursday, things just pop unbidden into your mind.  Those splotches on his face have always bothered me, and as he sank deeper into his tailspin, they seemed to almost glow to me, and when he went on about beer beer and more beer, I said myself that this dude is a whiskey drinker who thinks if he can pass himself off as just one of the boys hoisting a few brewskis, he’ll waltz right onto the Supreme Court like he was supposed to ever since he was a pup in his own eyes.   

My mind popped again, this time to any local tappy – taproom – in the America Brett Kavanaugh wants to make crucial decisions about and I said again to myself that this schmuck would last about ten minutes in any bar I’ve ever been in if he started being as nasty as he was in front of a senate panel. 

Jesus, again to myself, I wonder what the justices on the Supreme Court are thinking as they watch this. How is a plainly weak and shaky whiner like this going to fit into their rarified and austere melieu? How are they going to relate tom him without the image of his nose-twitching, tongue-rolling, teary-eyed virtual breakdown popping into their very serious minds.  His performance makes Clarence Thomas look like Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Here was a privileged punk who had never been held to any decent accountability being called into account by serious and determined people who really didn’t buy any of his ragtime and it had him looking like a surly and tongue-tied teenager who had just smashed the family car into a tree after drinking two six-packs. He plainly and obviously couldn’t hack it and was so petulant and outraged that he talked back to his questioners like an otherwise tongue-tied twerp. Totally embarrassing  to everyone but him.

So this is a big week for America. Is the FBI going to go all the way in seeking the truth about this poor specimen of failed jurisprudence or will the canted and cockeyed and brutal realities of what is left of American politics again hold sway and will Brett Kavanaugh ride his White House patronage all the way to a seat on the most hallowed court in the land? Personally, I think he is best suited to judging hog-calling contests.