Sobriety without Anxiety

The effects are subtle; you have your typical impaired judgment accompanied by incoherent speech (that comes with any other fifth of Southern Comfort); however, added with two lines of Columbia’s finest, the buzz transitions into a different entity. Your impairment is heightened as your heart feels like it’s going to explode. Your muscles pour out lactic acid bringing you to convulse uncontrollably, and finally the near-death comatose.

Jimmy D. is hovered over me with his two fingers on my carotid artery and one hand on my heart. With Regan Youth blasting in the background of the dingy Erie Eastside “Punk House”, Jimmy D. hesitantly reassures the fellow punks, “He’s going to be alive, but I’m going to keep an eye on him for the rest of the night.” Jimmy D. was the local EMT that was in the Erie Punk Rock Scene, he was very distinct, a skinhead with a barbed wire tattooed all around his neck, and dark rimmed glasses. That night, I partied like it was 1999 well because it was 1999…

Being sober and drug free has now become a badge of honor. From the ages of fifteen to twenty-one, I lived a lifestyle of rebellion for I didn’t get fucked up. I think it may of came from the fact that a girl a grade below me was gang raped by fellow classmates at a party, a friend decapitated while driving drunk, countless others killed by drunk drivers, or my own near-death experience. Maybe it was also the relationships I’ve seen ruined, families destroyed, or a myriad of friends that have been raped at parties. Within the Symbolic Order of things, drinking alcohol was the norm and wasn’t some transgression transpired from teenage angst. As one gets older the methodology is the same but the location different; you go to the bar, fuck some stranger while contracting an STD or get pregnant and its love at first sight. Nevertheless, this allure that mystifies globally is a rite of passage for most. As a rite of passage, it serves as an agency of social cohesion and homogeneity, creating a social order that identifies itself as a necessity and at times creating an excess, alienating those who do not fit within that order.

Just like many others, alcohol was an escape from insecurities, anxieties, and the horrors of reality. It was a bandage for a gunshot wound. As I lay passed out on an ant-infested bathroom floor, I can feel the vomit travel through my esophagus, burning with every breath. Shortly after, with a slight bit of consciousness, my friends huddle around me urging for the next onslaught of binging.

Looking back, the punk rock lifestyle was no different than the status-quo in which it was reaction to. With similar rituals and attitudes, the escapist apathy coalesced in an existence that may seem antagonistic but in actuality reinforced its own cultural excess. Fraternity house or rental hall, the same bottle Jack Daniel gets passed around and the “great escape” continues on.

The mechanization and distance from our bodies has lead experience to embody a simulated reality. As Guy Debord put it, “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” It’s only now that representation is an abstract parallax to suppositions of our lived-experience. The comatose of intoxication is a transgression of a lived-experience plagued by the daily rituals within the Symbolic Order. The lived-experience of forgetting and escaping is the trauma of the Real. One sip becomes the journey down the rabbit hole only to be found buried alive. The white elephant plagues your living nightmare.

After many trials and tribulations I’ve found my vulnerabilities. Though my journey is still in its infant stage, I’ve found that isolation is a byproduct of cultural alienation. Nevertheless, sobriety serves as an actant to pursue further self-examination and solace in the midst of displacement. In addition, self-examination without an agency can be the hardest yet rewarding feat. By enabling one to tackle anxiety in its authentic form, the quest of self-liberation becomes more monumental and the embodiment of autonomy in the heart of darkness allows one to persevere in midst of any catastrophe. A call for mindfulness in a dying world.

Agency in the Mouth of the Dragon

"When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out."
- Ho Chi Minh

Driving through the seemingly uncoordinated districts of Vietnam, one sees the remnants of a revolutionary dystopia. A lottery ticket hustle of an adolescent, the burnt red skin of a backpack-hulling Westerner, brand new Mercedes juxtaposed by a swarm of scooters, and the myriad display of counterfeit designer clothing; this is post-revolutionary Vietnam, this an apocalypse now. However, amongst the fruits of doi moi or (renovation) lays a creature that is becoming formidable to Western liberal capitalism.

Historically speaking, Vietnam is a nation that has risen from the excrement of two colonial powers, creating an indigenous resistance that squashed its opposition through unconventional tactics. Nevertheless, with an organic revolutionary spirit, guided by the hammer and sickle, comes to what the Jacques Lacan would refer to as Vietnam’s big Other, the bureaucratization of the proletariat. Either way, the questionable reality of a dying revolution is what agency will Vietnam acquire after the rice fields have dried up, the last forest burnt down, the below poverty income is too much, and another free trade agreement disenfranchising the people?

The Dragon has flown out and the affects of doi moi has created a new a beast that emulates Singapore’s authoritarian capitalist with the extreme privatization that makes any Western liberal capitalist eyes light up like the napalm that scorched the land. On the recent trip to Ho Chi Minh City, one can’t stop but notice the renovation that’s being conducted; however, upon further investigation there seems to be something off. It seemed that the majority of the construction conducted was privatized and from foreign countries. This is something that can’t even be fathomed even in the U.S. for most road projects are run on a state-level conducted through the Department of Transportation and it would be blasphemy to have the taxpayer’s hard-earned money going to some private company (of course banks and car companies are an exception).

Nevertheless, in a somewhat paradoxical manner, the liberalization of capitalism is far more unhinged then its Western counterparts. With an estimated $600 million USD contract with France’s Vinci Construction, Vietnam is building an 11km stretch that will consist of two tunnels, three bridges, and expansion of the already built corridor connecting from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City1. With almost a quarter of a million multinational corporations investing2 and further privatization in the agricultural sector3, the vision of an agrarian reform isn’t quite what Uncle Ho expected (but neither was his request for the remains of his body4).

Interestingly enough, the agency in which one would seek in modern day Vietnam is one that is overshadowed by the necessity of the bourgeois or in this context, the governing few. Of course, with progress in being one of Asia’s fast growing economy5, there’s no doubt that the parasitic liberal capitalist country like the U.S. would have ulterior motives such as nuclear agreements with an old foe6.

As the materialization of socialist utopia beckons onto Vietnam, the reality of a farce is enacted on stage. The master and slave’s role are still unchanged, accumulation of wealth still exists and the tragedy of alienation comes with it. With the bourgeois construct of commodity fetishism still looming over a dying country, happiness is comfort in the material and a historical necessity is nestled into abstraction.