16 days before getting a facebook account

On April 14th, 8 days before I got a facebook account, I performed two songs at a local youth arts center, one I had written about the death of Thomas Kinkade.  This picture was posted of me last week by a friend on facebook:

I was my alter-ego Hank Pennyfox for the evening.  After the the two songs I talked to many people about the bizarre non-discussion of his passing.  The population of his devotees tastefully remembered the man with light-themed passages from the Bible; the anti-Kinkade crowd relentlessly gloated.  It was ridiculous and disgusting to read the dozens of comments that fell below the articles published on the internet in the days following his death.

I was proposing an affirmative meaning to the situation, that Kinkade exemplified everything that art is to most of America (coffee mugs, calendars, prints, masculinity, alcoholism, etc.) in such a stark way with what art should be (non-commercialism, creativity, innovation, ambiguity, etc.) that to see his era suddenly cease at a moment we all are attempting to define a new art for California sheds an infinite potential on our common goal.

What is strange is that I stopped not drinking on the night that Thomas Kinkade drank himself to death.  I did not make this connection by the time I was Hank Pennyfox a week later.  Nor did I make the connection at that point that the morning he died on was the same day that Jesus was crucified: Good Friday. He was found dead by his girlfriend on the morning that I woke up, Friday, with that strange vibrance that comes from drinking a fair amount and emerging unscathed, like I'd gotten away with something.  I didn't hear the news until the day after that, Saturday.  I walked down the hill with Alexandra to get some lunch, and turned down Lighthouse to pay respects to the Thomas Kinkade National Archive.  However, they had whited out "Thomas Kinkade" so it said "The [ ] National Archive." There was a circle of white over the former TKNA seal at the top of the sign.   Did that just happen that day? Because he died they just white out his name? Did he have a falling out with the owners, as he had had with so many others, and they modified it weeks ago without my noticing?

If there is indeed an important connection between myself and Thomas Kinkade it would be helpful to share why I had stopped drinking and therefore why it means something that I stopped not drinking on this fateful evening.

In February I watched Twin Peaks and decided that drinking had become an habitual distraction from my ability to confront truth with the effectiveness possessed by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper.  This may sound crazy—it may be crazy—but there is a strange cosmic logic to why this made sense to me:

1. When I began the job I presently hold in August, Kyle McLachlan came in with a party of 6 we were expecting because it included the wine writer of the Wall Street Journal, and I showed them to their table.  The wine writer drew several quick sketches of KM on the sheet of butcher paper, and, when I cleared the table, I tore it off and saved it.

2. In February I locked the front door the Saturday of the AT&T Pro-Am and flipped the sign "closed" and went to eat my dinner in the back.  Five minutes later I noticed someone had come in the door as someone else was leaving and that my colleague was explaining we were closed.  He was making this comically sincere devestated look of disappointment that only an actor like Bill Murray could pull off.  As it turned out, it was Bill Murray.

"We've been closed 5 minutes and Bill Murray is here.  Can I seat him?" I asked my boss.

"Go seat Bill Murray, Andrew," my boss said.  

My colleague did not recognize him, or know who he was when we explained later, and she listened to his pleas patiently, "I've been working since 5 in the morning today.  I'm really tired.  I'm really hungry—"

"Excuse me, sir," I interrupted.  "We do make exceptions.  Did I happen to hear you say you've been working since 5 this morning?" 

"Well, yes," he said, and I showed him the 2 others he was with to A2 which was available by the window.  

The lady the two men were with knew another co-worker of mine and stopped at the front to talk to him.  I asked where they thought she would sit so I would know which setting to remove from the 4-top.  Bill Murray gestured to the setting in front of him, but qualified his supposed full-hearty knowledge of where another person would like to sit by saying, "But sometimes you just don't know, you know."

I also happened to watch The Razor's Edge in the ensuing weeks (a VHS I had picked up months before, but had ignored due to the terrible review it got from the nice man dressed as a woman at the St. Vincent de Paul store).  Then I read the book. Bill Murray plays the main character of the book, Larry Darrell (there is no Somerset Maughm-stand-in narrator in the movie), the loafing soul-searcher who drops out of American bourgeois expectations, a film BM co-wrote on a road trip across the country at a moment he was vainly trying to drop out of Hollywood.  The film was produced by the studio because he and his cronies gave Ghostbusters to this studio.   He also inserts a eulogy for John Belushi into the script addressed t a character played by his real-life brother Brian Doyle-Murray.

3. One night I went to a bar with friends and drank and smoked cigarettes (something I had quit doing) and the next day I went to a taco place on the same block as the bar with a friend and my parents, slightly hungover, wearing a Cheers t-shirt.  Afterwards I saw three people that I saw the night before at the bar.  They saw my Cheers shirt and told me they just watched an episode of the show.  

"Season 1. Episode 10," one of them chimed in.  

We parted ways and my parents drove me home.  I talked excitedly about Twin Peaks and interpreting synchronicity for 4 very excited minutes, calling the detail "Season 1. Episode 10" very Lynchian in that it seemed simultaneously to be meaningless—absurdly so—and yet like some kind of clue to a greater meaning as of yet unclear; it makes the mystery richer, yet more potentially comprehensible.  I referred to it in my journal a few days as the “collision of media celebrating synchronicity with my life functioning  as a kaleidescope of that very uncanniness.”  

A few days later I was with an old friend and, again as described in my journal, “I free-associated to the fact that Twin Peaks was once on in the same timeslot as Cheers, and that I started watching Twin Peaks on the day that Laura Palmer calls ‘Day 1’ in her diary.”

AND THEN, a week after this other Friday I was to go to this bar again (Don't you want to go!), but it was too busy (it was a Friday night and I finish at the restaurant around 10:30). I went for a walk and met my friends at a quieter bar down the street a little later.  They talked about Cheers, and I had no idea that they also were watching Cheers.  I left to see a movie that my projectionist friend was playing at his work (the fantastic dance documentary Pina), and then rode bikes with him back to his house to find our other friends there watching Cheers.  We sat down, finished an episode (S1E9), and then started the next—S1E10.

I was excited because I had not revisited Cheers since I watched it in its entirety two years before, by myself, while living at my parents' house, and because IT WAS THE SAME EPISODE THAT THREE OTHER PEOPLE WATCHED AFTER GOING TO SEGOVIA'S, A LOCAL BAR WHERE EVERYONE KNOWS YOUR NAME, A WEEK AGO, AND WHO I SAW, WHILE WEARING A CHEERS SHIRT RIGHT AFTER THEY WATCHED IT.

I will transition over to what I wrote in my journal a few days later.

A very young Shooter McGavin—the nemesis to Adam Sandler's Happy Gilmore—plays a Red Sox pitcher who has been of late choking badly.  So of course he seeks out the king of blowing it as a Red Sox pitcher (LAUGHTER) Sam "Mayday" Malone for advice.  He catches Sam flipping a lucky bottlecap, insists on borrowing it, and disappears, leaving Sam flustered and consistently a little more off his game, so to speak.

Levity comes in numbers in Cheers.  That is, the more people in the bar, the less serious the scene.  That's why we go to bars, levity and company that we can’t find at home.  Sincerity, ultimata, break-ups, romance, etc. always occur in the office, or when the bar is closed.  Occasionally a sideplot will occur in the back room of the bar with pool table.  Season 1 episode 10 beautifully illustrates the light to heavy spectrum of the show, starting with a comic lucky charm plot and dozens of actors, and ending with dark themes and strong character and two people:

[Sam & Diane + regulars + nameless background patrons + guest star] are present when the humorous premise begins, thus giving Sam an audience when he slides his signature curved beer slide down the bar, as instigated by Cliff the mailman who bet a non-regular that it could be done.  Shooter McGavin takes Sam’s good luck bottlecap

[Sam & Diane + regulars + nameless background patrons] are present as Sam’s luck fades, as he psychs himself out for days, anticipating tragedy at every turn.

[Sam & Diane + regulars] remain in the bar on the night he asks for it back.  Sam can’t get through to Shooter at the ball park until the game is over.  And, just his luck (LAUGHTER), the game ends up going 16 innings.  Cast members peel away until at the end it is just

[Sam & Diane] when Sam calls and learns the lucky bottlecap was lost days before in Kansas City—Shooter was ashamed to say—and Sam realizes it’s gone for good, hangs up and invites the full depth a sitcom is capable of to fill the now empty bar.

“You see, Diane...”

The bottlecap keeps him from drinking.

It’s the cap to the last beer he ever had.

He’s lost it and now he’s going to get drunk.

He cracks a beer, pours it into a glass, stares it down, and

(APPLAUSE)

slides it to the other end of the bar where Diane is sitting in the perfect curve that Cliff bet on at the beginning of the episode, and he pockets his new lucky bottlecap and smirks a witty arrogant line (LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE).

At a certain point I recalled the episode but I had forgotten the Sam-is-a-recovering-alcoholic twist and it hit me like an epiphany.   I pocketed the aluminum tab from the can of Pabst I had finished, and I donated the three others that I had brought and put in the refrigerator, and I stopped drinking for almost two months.  

So why did I decide finally to once again start saying, “Well, yes, thank you, I would love a beer” on the night that Thomas Kinkade drank his last?  As I seem to deal with nothing other than tautologies of late, the answer would seem to be I started drinking when Kinkade stopped because I started drinking when Kinkade stopped, just as I am always writing about writing about writing, and now am posting on facebook about posting on facebook.