Writing and Drinking and Writing
The legend is that Stephen King wrote on an old IBM Selectric typewriter. I have never seen one, but the romance of the myth is almost as potent as Hemingway’s Cuban daiquiris. Mine is a shitty laptop that often shuts down on me, has a peeling sticker that catches the hairs on my right forearm as I type, and whose right mouse button only works if you hit it from a particularly acute angle from the right. It makes little noises at me, like tiny drunken mice sprinting like lightning in their circuitous wheels. It’s not even 1:00 in the afternoon, but I want to open the bottle of cabernet sauvignon in the kitchen because writers write, but writers also drink. It’s where the muse hides, in the bottom of the bottle. Bukowski knew that, slovenly fucking genius that he was. He knew she was down there, doing the breaststroke through waves of crimson manna, just waiting for us to summon her like a genie out of a lamp. It’s not to say that self-control is elusive, it just oscillates in