The Day and the Hour:: Drunkalogues & Mythologies

By Pablo G.

A Moment of Clarity

On Memorial Day, 1974, an itinerant drunk named Pablo made a spiritual discovery. Hunkered on a highway west of the Palouse, he glimpsed a life
in disarray, shorn of insight, heading nowhere and running scared

It takes a moment to recognize a life as your own.

One thing is certain: that turning point, without light or air, from which hed struggle as from an undertow, was in fact a divine panic: terror not of heartbreak or brain seizure, but of spiritual death, the heart vacant and staggering without purpose.

On that point hes definite. Sick, broke, without future, at a point of no return, a man is thrust face to the wall. On that day, in that hour, a breeze whispers in the trees, or it doesnt.

Still to recall it makes him shudder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504912846

Pablo G.

Pablo G. is the pen name for a guy celebrating forty years of sobriety and who insists that after a certain age, everything is for the last time, even if it’s not. The Day and the Hour, his text about his early days in recovery, is intended as a salute to the men who sponsored him, became surrogate fathers to him, and loved him until he could love himself. That’s how it works.

Book preview

39231.png

DRUNKALOGUES

& MYTHOLOGIES

By

PABLO G.

I

NTRODUCTION BY

G

EORGE

T.

39208.png

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2015 Pablo G. All rights reserved.

Photo credits: copyright Pablo G: Bottle Rings on Wood, 2014

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/20/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1283-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1284-6 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Drunkalogues

Introduction

Author’s Note

Late Night, Bad Ticker

La Jornada del Muerto

that first year

The Things They Told Me

white knuckles

New York, winter

Man from Two Worlds

Pick Your Spot

The Day & the Hour

Eye-opener

My Secret

My 1st Sponsor

Kamala

Day One

The Pity Tapes

Custodianship

Big Night Out

Eskimo Pie

home room days

Shots, Sophie

the Words

Old Ideas

a room, a woman, a bottle

Homer’s Rant

Origin

Design for Living

cracks in the shell

Geographical

Sisyphus

Ghost Shirt

Thinking it Through

What My Sponsor Taught Me

Ground Zero

10 years’ drinking

My Slip

cheap razor, jitters

Inventory: evasions & conceits

Bad Actor

Hands Up: testimony of driver

The Affair

Three Months Later

Meeting Lone Bear

Powerless

Service

Happy, Joyous & Free

Observe & Report

How My Jaw Got Broken

How I Got My Name

A Psychic Marriage

My 1st Sponsor +Twenty Years

Inventory II

The -Ism

The Things They Told Me, II

Voyage into Silence

Several Years Out

Strangers on the Shore

Oldtimer

Filmography: a tribute

About the author…

Mostly, we lie.

—Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story

Dedications

dedicated to those in basements & upper rooms

with cups of hairy coffee, where a man

comes clean and gets a grip on

the day & the hour

to Irish Jim, poet in a black suit

who taught me that the art

of living was negotiable

up to a point

to Big Geoff (d. 2010)

whose clothes I still wear,

to George T. who drove me

places in his blue Chevy

& to Bob M. who

wrote a song about me

to Dave A. (1940-2000)

who took a sock in the eye

at a desert dive and

saved me a trip to the hospital

to the men & women of the original

Cheney Group who kept coming

back, and stayed after

Introduction

The Day and the Hour: drunkalogues & mythologies is not like any other of this author’s books. After my first read through, I experienced difficulty in coming to terms with this book of poetry. Then, moved to tears during my second read through as I reencountered the poem, My 1st Sponsor + Twenty Years, I knew what I had to say. This book is not the most stylistic and polished of Pablo’s books, but it is, simply, the best poetry, start to finish, about addiction and recovery I’ve ever read. The poetry displays the craft of the poet as well as the material of a perceptive human being, learning to face life on life’s terms. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Drunks and addicts will recognize in Pablo’s poetry their own follies, their own flights of imagination, the painful realities and cruel self-deceptions that go into what addicts call hitting bottom. They won’t be surprised to read that the same flights and deceptions, the same uncomfortable truths accompany addicts all along the way as they trudge the road to happy destiny, their days filled sometimes with laughter and sometimes with tears.

Here’s a promise. If you’re not an addict yourself, The Day and the Hour will serve as a handy guide to how an addict thinks and acts and, more importantly, feels. The most insightful moment comes in another poem