An Excerpt From “Aristocracy, Technology and the Illusion of Progress.”

In his forthcoming book, artist and author Clarence Doskocil (AKA Diogenes the Cynic) engages in the time-honored writing of aphorisms, following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius and Francois de La Rochefoucauld. Soon to be released by Unovis Press, it is a work anxiously anticipated by The Functioning Addict. Mr. Doskocil has been kind enough to submit an appropriate maxim for our consideration here. He has our thanks.

Alcohol and Narcotics as the Double-Edged Sword.

Who hasn’t felt the jolt of some type of substance, and who has not been lifted out of melancholy and depression after a few drinks or other combinations of chemical substances that have been deemed “bad” or “illegal” by the forms of external powers that we concede too much power to those that therefore try to control and attempt to refine the parameters of our lives? My theory is that these substances give us that original “jolt” of existence that we felt when the world was new to us; the unwrapping of a present on Christmas, your first bike ride with friends, or being alone in the woods without any adult supervision. As the Spanish Philosopher Ortega y Gassete said: “As adults, we loose that wondrous ability to see the world through the eyes of a child.” We are simply trying, with various success, to recapture that original hyper-intensive feeling of existence we felt when we were first learning to deal with this universe of tangibles. The flip side may be we are not structured to deal with the “newness” of experiences like we did as children. Our bodies age, yet it seems our minds get more refined, while our bodies simply cannot tolerate the effects of what these substances do to us. Our hangovers become more intense, and we find ourselves looking into the mirror after a long night or binge and find that we recognize our physical exposure to the Universe. We see the literal signs of aging and/or we feel our body craving the withdrawal back to normality and boring sobriety. We pursue the extra drinks when we know we are reaching our limits, and we try to maintain and intensify this feeling of living in the moment like we naturally did in the past when not only the world was new, but we were new.