An Opening Prayer

Get Drunk!
by Charles Baudelaire

One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.

Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.

And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the clock will all reply: “It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.

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Amen, Chuck.

It seems I've stumbled upon a forum...

I am Silenus, son of Pan, tutor of Dionysus - I ride an ass because I am too drunk to walk. But I am only just drunk enough to write, and on that note I begin, the note of intoxication. Unfortunately, my present situation is such that only liquor will intoxicate me (although in this present state any intoxicant is a weapon to be wielded against vulgarity, liberal values, and general American mediocrity).

Ass as my steed, bottle in one hand and pen in the other, I approach the gilded gates of American culture a rebel, an insurgent, an enemy combatant, General Sherman burning one book club at a time, all with a riotous, uproarious euphoria. For two thousand years I've stumbled drunkenly in and out of human affairs. No longer will I tolerate such ephemeral relevance, ephemeral wretches! I am a meandering, directionless demigod of decadence, a termite laying feast to the Constitution.

My goal: my rightful place in the American Pantheon, a celebration of Dionysus from sea to shining sea, an emergence of an American paganism!