John Ramey, Esq. RIP

"But when our self-will had driven everyone away, and our isolation had become complete, it caused us to play the big-shot in cheap barrooms, and then fare forth alone on the street to depend on the charity of passersby."  Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

When I was trying to pull myself together after getting booted from Optometry College I lived for a year in a house with a couple of guys who were attending college if what you could call what they were doing "attending college."  One of them had quite a nice illegal pot hothouse in his walk-in closet and didn't ever seem to go to classes or do any other college stuff.  The other guy - John Ramey - was the poster child for alcoholic destruction.  He was not the smartest man I've ever met and he was morbidly obese, due in part to his short stature but mostly, I surmise, because he drank huge quantities of beer and never moved out of his chair.  I hung around with these men but particularly John.  I cannot imagine what we could have talked about.  He liked my style of hard rock and matched me beer for beer and bong hit for bong hit, but what else could we have discussed?  Picasso's Blue Period?  The threat of barbarian invasions taking place at the same time the structure of the new religion - Christianity - was destabilizing the Roman Empire?  Quinoa versus brown rice?  Quantum physics or organic chemistry?

The above quote from The Big Book has always stuck with me.  At the end, before I began discarding all human activity, meaningful to trivial, in favor of drinking alone, all by myself, I had reached the stage where the only requirement for companionship  I had was that you drank and used like I did.  All relationships were predicated on this fact.  And I'm taking great pains not to judge myself too important or smart or talented to spend time with any "lesser" human beings; only that all I wanted was to have the occasional person to drink heavily with.