Battling the Bottle

"All that night by lamplight we sing and yell songs which is okay but in the morning the bottle is gone and I wake up with the 'final horros' again, precisely the way I woke up in the Frisco skidrow room before escaping doown here, it's all caught up with me again, I can hear myself again whining, 'Why does God torture me?' - but anyone who's never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who don't drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsiblity - the mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth, the efforts nay the birth pangs of your mother when she bore you and delivered you to the world, you've betrayed every effort your father ever made to feed and and raise you and make you strong and my God even educate you for 'life,' you feel a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil and God seems far away abandoning you t your sick silliness - You feel sick in the greatest sense of the word, breathing without believing in it, sicksicksick, your soul groans, you look at your helpless hands as tho they were on fire and you cant move to help, you look at the world with dead eyes, there's  on your face an expression of incaluable pining like a constipated angel on a cloud. . .

I'm SICK" I yell emphatically to the trees, to the woods around, to the hills above, looking around desperately, nobody cares -"

Jack Kerouac,

Big Sur