To be reborn

I don't very often suffer a complete alcohol-induced memory wipe.

In fact, I don't think I've ever suffered a classic 'blackout', which, I understand from doctor friends, only results from prolonged periods of self-destructive excess, and typically erases periods of at least several hours, if not whole days together, from the memory.

No, a slightly sketchy recall of the latter stages of the evening (when my brain is three-quarters shut down, and getting me home on 'auto-pilot') is the worst that I can usually claim.

More thoroughgoing memory-loss incidents happened to me a few times in my wild youth - and I somehow rather miss them. To wake up after a huge bender, convinced that you have probably done bad things the night before, but having no recollection whatsoever of what they were, was a strangely invigorating sensation. It was like being pardoned for your sins, being given a clean slate..... almost as though you could begin your whole life again anew from that point.

I have quite often fantasized about how liberating, how empowering a dose of total amnesia might be!

The only time I've had such an episode recently was at the going-away session for my pal Big Frank 10 or 11 months ago. Strangely enough, on that occasion, it was a segment from the middle of the evening that went missing (perhaps I had been caning the double JD & cokes a little too vigorously during the extended afternoon 'happy hour' in the bar where we kicked things off), but I got a 'second wind' later on..... and can remember the later parts of that long, long bar crawl in rather too much detail.

It's a strange business, to be sure.

I have - for some years now! - been playing around with a possible structure for a 'drinking' novel ('Barstool Blues'), in which the protagonist is perpetually waking up without a clue where he is, and - trying to reconstruct the memories of the previous day - finds himself reminiscing about things that may perhaps have happened years before.... or indeed, perhaps about things that have yet to happen. The same sort of time-jumping, reality-flipping, multi-strand narrative structure used by Vonnegut in 'Slaughterhouse 5', in fact - "Listen. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." No new thing under the sun.

What do you think, though? Any mileage in it??