Life and Loss with Michigan Basketball

This post will be installed in segments. This is part 1. 

Previously: Life and Loss with the Red Wings

After getting rained on during my evening jog through these suburban neighborhoods - the domestic houses silent in the lazy Sunday dusk - I secluded myself away for the evening. I opened yet another tin of chewing  tobacco - another weekend away from booze, at least - and listened to the freezing rain patter on the rooftop and the February gales whistling through the treetops behind the house. A basketball game from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois glowed from the television screen, teams in bright orange and bright yellow executing layups at opposite ends of the court in the calm before the storm. It felt like a mid-winter's dream: I had spent years upon years of my life waiting for this moment, but it didn't feel real.

There I was, rapidly approaching the quarter century mark of my life, feeling like an old man: full of nostalgia and regret. Late November of 1992, when I was but a little tyke, was the last time a Michigan basketball team held the national number one ranking. That could all change that Sunday evening as I watched from the basement of the home I grew up in. It was supposed to mean something. Or so the sports media pundits would have you think. Any true basketball fan knows that a number one ranking in February means nothing. Yet it did mean something. It was a weight that followed me that night on my jog through the streets of my hometown, to the couch where I listened to the sounds of winter outside as I caught my breath from the bitter cold, through the narcotic high as the chewing tobacco sunk in.

What meant something wasn't any number one ranking, though. It was the twenty years in between number one rankings.

Baptism in Dirty Water:"He Takes a Timeout. They Don't Have Any Timeouts!"

Life's narrative begins at our first memory. For me, that was the night my baby brother was born. I don't remember when my parents walked me to the Kapler's house next door as they departed for the hospital, although I know now that happened. I don't remember what games we played, or what movie we watched, or anything, at the Kapler's house that night. I  don't even remember my mom ever being pregant, really. But I remember quite distinctly how I couldn't sleep that night. I wanted to go home. I must have known something life-changing had happened. And I remember the sticky heat of that June night, when the Kapler's walked me across their green front lawn to my own house next door  in the middle of the night. My life would never be the same as soon as I walked into my house that night, for the first time ever as a brother.

Sports fans have similar moments - that first ever memory of when sport came into their lives like a new baby brother. For me, it was the Webber timeout.

There's a hazy, smoke-filled memory of a gathering at my new house; there's something important happening on the television screen - antennae sticking out and all in those days - glass mugs with some sort of brown substance in them, people a lot bigger than me congregated around the television set. Its sort of like one of those very late night bar memories where your memories are fuzzy and don't fit in any order. I'm under a table, or peeking from behind a couch, or something like that. The sports announcers on the television are shocked. The people in the room groan in unison, like they all found out someone just died. Chris Webber had called timeout.

My family's comically oversized computer, brand new in 1994, came with a complimentary Sports Illustrated: 1993 Year in Review CD-Rom. The images from that video compilation are as fresh in my mind today as they were in '94, as I watched that video hundreds of time, truly fascinated with this sports thing: Bama's George Teague stripping the ball from Miami in the Sugar Bowl, Mario Lemieux announcing his diagnosis of Hodgkin's disease, America's Team, The Cowboys, winning the Super Bowl. But most prominent is the incredulous cry of the announcer, "He takes a timeout! They Don't Have any timeouts!" as Chris Webber found himself trapped in the corner amidst defenders cloaked in Carolina blue. The seconds were ticking away on the Fab Five era and on the national championship game, and Webber formed a "T" with his hands whilst tucking the ball under his arm.

Those words mesmerized me: : "He takes a timeout. They don't have any timeouts! Technical foul! Technical foul!"

There probably never was a boy more affected by the words "technical foul" than me. Over the years, those words ringed in my head during those endless classroom hours as the nuns scrawled Geography terms on the blackboards, the old radiator fumbling away in the background. I thought about Webber's facial expression after he called that timeout; pure sadness and regret was an emotion my five year-old self had never known. I spent countless after-school hours in front of the basketball hoop in my driveway, imagining I was Chris Webber during that moment. I desperately wanted to correct the frown on Webber's face, and I always pretended I was him going up for the last second shot. And I smiled, as if my play in my driveway could alter the course of fate. I hated that look on his face - it was just so sad.

It seems almost fitting now that a frown would play such a pivotal part in my sports upbringing: a baptism in dirty water.

Late Sunday Evening Drives

A golden moon and the two headlights from my truck my only guiding lights, a Seger song humming from the radio, a tin of chewing tobacco my only companion in the passenger seat, a country road winding through the Michigan woods or alongside some creek bed or past some small town farms - cows asleep in the barns, and preferably some low-hanging fog: that's a portrait of my ideal Sunday evening late night drive.

On the lonely country roads, it's easy to feel like you can drive past the petty stresses of daily life or whatever is troubling your soul at that particular point of your life. And the calm of the lazy Sunday night provides the perfect atmosphere from some in-depth thought, introspection about your past or about your future or just about whatever girl has hold of your imagination at the time.

Sometimes I'll drive past those places that occupy a special spot in my past. Through Ann Arbor, gazing at the collegiate streets sprinkled with students and the crows perched above on telephone wires. Past the old college house, wondering where the years have went. Or past some of your watering holes, wondering about whatever sadness has brought those souls to the bar on a Sunday evening. Or past the parks where you had Little League games some years ago, imagining simpler times.

But sometimes it's best to think about nothing at all. To just breathe the night air and let your mind rest for a half an hour or an hour. To let the worry of the preceding week and another fast-approaching week dissolve into the night sky, let the tobacco buzz sink in, and simply feel alive in the present night.

The Simple Pleasures of This Suburban Life

"I think about that moment whenever some blowhard starts talking about the anonymity of the suburbs or the mindlessness of the TV generation. Because we know that inside each one of those identical boxes, with it's dodge parked out front and it's white bread on the table and it's TV set glowing blue in the falling dusk, there were people with stories. There were families bound together in the pain and the struggle of love. There were moments that made us cry with laughter. And there were moments, like that one, of sorrow and wonder."

                                                                   - The Wonder Years

When I lived in Chicago, I detested the city life, or so I thought. Hearing the incessant sirens on the streets below my loft apartment building, sitting amongst the filth of the subway trains and watching the rats that scurried along the tracks in between train arrivals, breathing the smog-infested air, searching in vain for any rustic enclave to escape to, missing my friends, girlfriend, and most of all my Wolverines - it all seemed to me then that it was the Windy City's fault.

Yet when I moved back to the Michigan suburbs, I found myself missing Chicago. I missed the camaraderie of sharing that confined little loft space that looked out over the Sears Tower and the rest of that lively city with Lake Michigan in the distance, I missed the bustle of people - always full of life and caffeinated energy - on the sidewalks during rush hour, I missed the limitless night scene that never left you lacking for weekend plans, and - most shockingly to me - I missed Chicago sports and the Wrigley summer nights and random Blackhawk games during the winter and all the awesome sports bars in between. I was very lost at that point of my life, and there probably wasn't a setting in America that I couldn't find myself unhappy in.

I've discovered that a lot of those rather pessimistic feelings were largely driven by my own latent depression. I wish I could go back and experience Chicago depression-free - or at least with an open-mind - and I wish I could take back the last year or so of my life in Michigan and re-live it without the depression and the otherwise emotionless version of me, but I can't. Those years will always be a part of me, and I'm alright with that, because it's contributed to where I stand today. What I can do is learn from the mistakes I made in not appreciating either of those periods of my life. The little things in life are oftentimes the best in life after all. Perhaps the greatest truth I've learned over these past years is that your surroundings do not define your outlook, but rather that you define your own outlook.

Life in the suburbs may not be an ideal living situation for me at this point of my life, but I'm learning that making the best of it is important. Living in the present is, after all, what all those Romantic-era poets that I read in college were writing about.

I've found a lot of solace in running these past couple months. It's not just the running that has given me some peace, but it's the sights and sounds and smells I've experienced on those runs that have provided me a comfort that I thought I had lost along with childhood. The simple things about my surroundings, the simple pleasures of this suburban life:

• The stars in a midnight blue sky - not clouded by the smog of city life, but framed by a silhouette of treetops instead.
• The aroma of the spaghetti's and charcoal-cooked burgers and Hamburger Helper's wafting from houses passing by.
• The simple thought that someone would spend hours carefully crafting each of hundreds of Christmas lights and chimney-top Santa figurines - a testimony to the purity and simplicity and also the slow clock of life in suburbia.
• Running through the same circular neighborhoods,  past each of those identical cookie-cutter boxes, yet thinking about how each one of those monotonous houses holds some story that means a lifetime to someone. 
• The pleasant perfume puffs of laundry sheets blowing through those little laundry rooms vents to the cold weather, and somehow each one of them with it's own unique smell.
• Knowing the exact houses you will smell the distinct scent of marijuana from on Friday's and Saturday's.
• Running through my cousin Frank's old neighborhood and thinking about how awesome those childhood years for us were: the summer days that held no limits, the baseball games in Frank's backyard and Uncle Frank's hot dogs in between games, winter nights sledding down the banks of the river in those woods, wondering if all of our grade school crushes names were still written in those attic walls we used to hang out in - it all comes back to me each night as I run by, bringing back a sense of calm that can only be associated with innocence.
• Best of all, it's the simple conversations about the nothingness of your daily routine. For me, those conversations are with a guy I grew up with and one of my best friends, Bryan. Though it might not seem like we have much to talk about with all the monotony of our daily lives (it usually goes: sports, fantasy sports, how shitty was your day?, weekend plans, sports), I'm certain it's something we'll look back on someday as something that represented how close we were during these difficult, yet determinant days of our lives.

It may not seem like much, but even a nightlight can seem very bright when you're emerging from a very dark room.

The Perils of this Twentysomething Life

Over-educated, underemployed, isolated by our own internet-dependent generation, and staring down a real world fraught with more instability than ever, it's no easy task to be a twentysomething-year-old these days.

We were reared in sheltered suburban  homes where we were encouraged that we could be 'whatever we wanted' when we grew up, only to find our first dreams dashed along the way. We grew up spoiled by the prosperous nineties never knowing what a recession was, yet we emerged from college to face exactly that. We were educated in elementary schools that hammered home the notion that each one of us was a special flower, only to find an adult world where flowers went to die. We participated in sports leagues and after school activities that handed us a trophy just for signing up, only to realize that the corporate world doesn't give out participation points. We over-payed for a college education in which we were educated as much in barroom etiquette and keg-tapping as any job skills or real-world strategies, left to find ourselves ill-equipped and ill-prepared for post-grad realities upon the tragedy of graduation day.

And we inherited a world in which oftentimes the candlelight of hope seems to grow dimmer by the day. We inherited the internet age, in which we have no trouble conversing with strangers on message boards yet we don't even offer one another a smile on the subway. We inherited the era of social media, in which we exercise our 'special flower' muscles in the mistaken notion that the outside world cares about the minute details of our everyday lives. We inherited an environmental crisis and a lifetime of governmental debt, feeling passionate about changing the world but distraught with the realization that even a presidential campaign founded on the concept of "Change" won't change much. We inherited a mental health crisis, in which no one blinks twice anymore at the newest school shooting on the news. We inherited an America where traditional family values struggle to survive, and we face the depressing reality that even love might not save us - as just as many marriages fail as succeed these days.

Worse yet, we don't even have a landmark event to define our generation's turbulent plight. It's not that the troubles of young adulthood are unique to my generation. The opening page of Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises contains the inscription, "you are all a lost generation"; the novel was a response to the cavernous void his young generation was left in after a world war devastated not only countries but the human spirit.  Perhaps even more extreme, the baby-boomer generation largely dropped out entirely during the revolutionary sixties that would be defined by society-changing events such as Vietnam, Woodstock and the 1969 Democratic National Convention. My generation of young people suffers from the same afflictions those previous generations did, but without any real triggering event to explain any of it. Even our voids are void of meaning.

We Generation Y'ers are facing unprecedented instability in our mid twenties. With the average age of marriage ever-increasing - and Ted Mosby as our heroic example of that phenomenon - we are left in limbo for an increasing period of time; more and more of us are exploring the adult world as lonesome travelers or serial daters through our twenties whereas our parents already had kids and houses by this time in their own lives. And with the recession hitting our generation the hardest, many of us are working at jobs we're vastly overqualified for or worse, the increasingly common and equally frustrating unpaid internship.The insufficiency of the job market, coupled with our student loans, create a world of financial instability as well. And alas, College friends you swore you'd never lose touch with get lost along the way. Instability abound, it can be a tough time indeed.

The grand irony of it all is that we will one day look back and miss these very days. Until then, I'm learning its best to soak it all up. Cling to your friends. Take steps to better yourself. Get out of your comfort zone. Spend money on things that make you happy. Travel when you can. Take a backroad instead of the main highway. Learn from your past but live in the present. Start being the person you want to be in the future.

We just might emerge on the other side better off than when we started.

2012, the Sports Year in Review

As they say, when one door closes another door opens. It's always sad when one of those doors closes, but it's always exciting when you get a glimpse of what's behind the new door. It's true in life as it is sports, especially when the fine line between sports and life is often blurred, as it is and always has been for me.

A Door Closing

Spoiled by success unprecedented in National Hockey League history throughout my lifetime (they haven't missed the playoffs since I was 3 years old), it pains me to admit this. But I think a door has closed for the Detroit Red Wings, and us residents of Hockeytown are staring down a new era in which - gasp - the Wings are not competing for Stanley Cups year in and year out.

It's been a gradual downturn for the Motor City's Winged-Wheelers. From Stanley Cup runners-up in '09 to back-to-back second round losses at the hands of the San Jose Sharks to last year's embarrassing five game loss to the Nashville Predators - who seem to have finally caught up to the team they modeled their franchise off of - the Wings have been hanging onto threads under the guise that they can still compete with the NHL's top guns. But the departure of Nick Lidstrom and the failure to sign either of the big name free agents in Zach Parise and Ryan Suter stood as a bitter reminder of what Wings fans have been denying for years: the glory days have passed us by here in Hockeytown.

For some reason, the exact moment I heard about Parise and Suter sticks out in my mind as one of the preeminent memories of 2012. I attribute that to the ongoing denial that was going on in my own head for years. I kept telling myself that one sniper could fix the broken Wings, that one stout defenseman could replace Lidstrom and all would be well again. It was the Fourth of July. My buddy and I were on the freeway headed to the lake house with a case of beer in the trunk. He glanced up from his phone and told me the news: 'Parise and Suter sign with Minnesota'. That's when I knew. An era was over.

Mediocrity or not, I'd much rather be watching a .500 Red Wings team than suffering through the agony that is this winter's lockout. This winter break, I had plans to a) be playing pond hockey in a backyard rink; b) be watching the Red Wings play in the Big House - an interwoven glory combining my two favorite sports teams while simultaneously being allowed to consume alcohol in Michigan Stadium for the first time. . . legally c) be watching my favorite OHL team in the London Knights play the hometown Plymouth Whalers in an outdoor game at Comerica Park. Due to global warming and the NHL lockout, I will be doing none of those things. Talk about a hockey buzzkill.

A Door Opening

Circa 1998 found the younger version of me in the midst of a full-blown love affair. It was the era in which I was falling in love - an outright obsession probably better describes it - with University of Michigan athletics. My extended family, including all of my aunts and uncles and cousins, were gathered at my family's house for some unremembered family gathering and also to watch Michigan basketball in the NCAA tournament. After a heartbreaking 3 point loss to UCLA I threw some sort of temper tantrum and stormed off while those around me watched with dropped jaws - it was an unappealing scene that would be mimicked many a time in college as booze only heightened my rage/sorrow after each sorry Michigan football loss during those regrettable Rich Rod years, usually resulting in broken bottles in my college house basement. It wasn't pretty, but I don't even know what would have happened had I known that day that Michigan basketball would suffer through a time that could aptly be labeled "The Dark Ages of Michigan Basketball" in the subsequent decade following that day.

I remember being excited about winning an NIT championship. I remember when progress meant losing to Michigan State by less than 10. I remember sitting in a Crisler Arena desperately in need of renovations with a half-full student section and an entirely empty upper bowl during the Amaker era of my early college years.

John Beilein has ushered in an era where I don't have to be excited about an NIT tournament appearance or a competitive game with Michigan State. After reinvigorating a fanbase that had detached themselves from the basketball team in the last decade with tournament appearances led by the likes of Zack Novak and Stu Douglass, the real cavalry has arrived in the form of big-name recruits. And Beilein has the Wolverine fan base at the very least as excited about the basketball season as the football team. And for the first time since five freshman wearing baggy shorts captivated the nation's attention, Final Four runs in the coming years appear to be a realistic aspiration for Michigan basketball.

What Could Have Been

There are always those sports moments that you can look back and wonder, had it come out the other way, would it be one of those precious memories that defines 2012 when I look back on it in five or ten years? The foremost memory that got away is obviously the Detroit Tigers coming up short in the World Series. I wrote at length in my "1984" Blog Post what a World Series would mean in terms of my life. It didn't happen, and you always have to wonder if it is, like that 2006 freshman year loss to Ohio State that prevented us from a shot at the National Championship, something I will always look back to and wonder what could have been.

Denard Robinson's electric run against Ohio State also comes to mind. In Michigan lore, there are two defining moments in Michigan football history: Desmond Howard's punt return in The Game ("One man! Goodbye. Helloooo Heisman") and Charles Woodson's eerily similar punt return along the very same sideline in 1997's version of The Game ("Charles Woodson! Down the sideline! He's gonna go! All the way!"). I remember thinking after watching Denard's run that this might be Denard's defining moment, a moment that could potentially be played right alongside Howard and Woodson's punt returns as the defining moments of the past 25 years of Michigan Football. Alas, the thought of what could have been in terms of that run will haunt me for years.

2013

We watch sports because it is hope. Hope that one day, no matter how far off, we will watch our teams hoisting a trophy. Hope that one day, we can experience a life-defining moment, watching with the people we care about - with friends or with your father or with your future son - that we will never forget. There's no lack of hope in the looming sports year of 2013. The Tigers should again be in the hunt for a World Series and will undoubtedly be overwhelming favorites for yet another pennant. The Wolverines Basketball squad looks to repeat as B1G champions and also looks to remind a deprived fan base what it's like to make a deep tournament run again. Dreams seem aplenty for the forthcoming year in sports. And, after all, dreams are what make life tolerable.

2012, A Year in Review

The season is upon us now, a time for gifts and giving
And as the year draws to a close, I think about my living
- John Denver

When it comes to nostalgia, I'm guilty as sin. On any given day you can find visions from my past dancing around my head: visions of my childhood friends and I building a fort in the woods behind our houses or visions my college friends and I enjoying some 40's of malt liquor after class. But there is a fine line between nostalgia and living in the past; the former is fine and dandy, but the latter can be unhealthy.

Self-admittedly, I have spent a large portion of the past two years living in the past. Whether it be clinging to college drinking habits, trying to revert back to a college lifestyle when I was happy, or taking a ride down memory lane with the proverbial "One That Got Away" one thousand too many times, I was living in the past.

I think about the past two years and one word comes to mind: stuck. Stuck in some sort of rut. There were certain stretches where it seemed I was making absolutely no progress in growing up, in emotional healing, in my life's own progress whatsoever. Part of it was me not ready to heal. Part of it was me not ready to grow up. But a large part of it was me sitting back and waiting for something to happen.

Nick Hornby describes an eerily similar rough patch in his life in the close-to-home novel Fever Pitch:

"That night I was as usual looking to Arsenal to show me that things did not stay bad forever, that it was possible to change patterns, that losing streaks did not last. Arsenal, however, had other ideas: they seemed to want to show me that troughs could indeed be permanent, that some people, like some clubs, just couldn't ever find ways out of the rooms they had locked themselves into. It seemed to me that night and for the next few days that we had both of us made too many wrong choices, and had let things slide for far too long, for anything to ever come right"

I found myself locked in one of those rooms during one particularly bad breakdown this year. I went for about a 10 mile walk in Hines Park, where I spent a great deal of my childhood, hungover and depressed and thinking I had, like Hornby, made too many wrong choices for anything to ever come right. Wrong choices in the way I had handled certain relationships, wrong choices in leaving Chicago, wrong choices in trapping myself in a career I wasn't sure I wanted, wrong choices in the having one too many drinks on occasion, wrong choices in feeling sorry for myself for too long. Wondering what had happened to the happy-go-lucky, carpe-diem me from college. It was hell.

But a strange thing happened in the ensuing weeks. I resolved that I wouldn't sit back and wait for changes any longer. It's true as they say, "you can't expect different results if you keep doing things the same way you have always done things". Determined to stop feeling sorry for myself, I resolved to change the way I did some things. I started to ask for help, I started exercising regularly for the first time in years, I started to eat more healthy, and I started to change some of those drinking habits. And things are looking up.

You don't have to stay in the room you've locked yourself into. I know it doesn't happen overnight, but things can change if you work towards it. For the first time in a long time, I'm feeling ready for the next big step in my life. And for the first time in a couple years now, I'm entering the holiday season feeling better about my life than I did the previous year's holiday season.

Here's to a new year in 2013. I think it will bring good things.

The Best of 2012

Other than that, some pretty cool things happened in the previous year - some things that I don't think I'll soon forget.

• The Sugar Bowl, New Orleans, LA. The first day of 2012 found me road-tripping down south to bayou country with a carload of people. We crossed the Louisiana border somewhere around 4 a.m. I was driving, hopped up mountain dew and chewing tobacco, while the other passengers dozed off erratically. I don't think I'll ever forget the feeling that came over me upon first seeing the neon Nawlins lights appear in the windshield. Our host for the weekend was sound asleep and we were locked out, so we walked down the willow tree-lined street and ventured inside an old hole-in-the-wall bar. We put a few country songs on the jukebox and sipped on a few beers while talking with the surprisingly wide-awake patrons. 5:00 a.m. on a Monday morning - but from the patrons you wouldn't guess it wasn't happy hour on a Friday. There's nothing like New Orleans. I also met a pretty cool girl on that trip - it was the first time I had felt feelings for anyone else since the previous summer. And that was important. 
• Public Defender's Office, Ypsilanti, MI. Although I wasn't necessarily fond of this job, it would be an understatement to say I'll never forget some of the individuals I came across. This summer I conducted my first trial, conducted my own interviews at the Washtenaw County Jail, and heard some incredibly entertaining excuses for postive drugs tests (see: spider bites, 'my girlfriend bit me'). Not necessarily my favorite part of 2012, but a memorable one nonetheless.
• Up North Trips with the old Friends, St. Joseph's, Ontario; Pentwater; Schuss Mountain. Perhaps the most redeeming aspect of 2012 was my reunification with my childhood friends. We had remained friends throughout the years, but we are closer than we have ever been now. After college I really lamented the loss of the college friends. It was an incredibly difficult adjustment to go from seeing them everyday to one day just never seeing them. But I've learned that new periods of your life bring new people, and I'm incredibly greatful for the new group of close friends I have now. Life can surprise you like that - it'll bring you new people and new adventures you never expected. That's a pretty cool phenomenon.

Chicken Soup for the Whiskey Soul: Top 5 Alcohol Books

As I was home for Christmas break of some college yesteryear, my mother admired the list of books I was asking for over the holidays and asked, "do you realize that all the authors you ever read were notorious drinkers?". Of course I did. Since a young age even, I have related to those whiskey souls: it started with Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan in high school, graduated to Kerouac and Hemingway in my literary collegiate days, and has presently become an ever-expanding bookshelf in my bedroom of alcohol-related books from all generations. I don't know what it says about me, but my own personality naturally gravitates towards those tales of seeking out the marrow of life in the whiskey hours of the morning, the soul-searching affliction of the whole process, and the introspection precipitated by the bottle.


1. Big Sur, Jack Kerouac. The sky may have been the limit for Kerouac, dubbed the first voice of the rebellious sixties generation after the American classic On the Road finally found success. A la Kurt Cobain, though, the most famous of the Beat Generation Writers seemed to struggle truly, rather than popularly, with demons in the face of success; unable to live up to the title "voice of a generation" that he had earned from legions of On the Road fans, Kerouac faced depression and alcoholism rather than happiness and sunshine in the wake of his life's greatest success. In one last attempt to find peace and sobriety, Kerouac headed west once more for the seclusion of the California pines on the Big Sur coast. He wouldn't make it much further.

Like it had many before him, the literary world lost a great writer to alcohol at far too young an age when Kerouac succumbed to cirrhosis. Big Sur, the writer's final literary mark of sorts, doesn't mince words. It is the frightening account of the final stages of alcoholism: deep-seated depression, mental deterioration, terrifying visions of the devil himself via delirium tremens, the tragic account of someone fighting in vain to beat the disease.

We never hear of the demises of most writers. There is no Hemingway story of his final years attempting to sober up or the days leading up to his suicide. There's no Hunter S. Thompson account of the battles that led him to the same fate. In that way, it is a tribute to Kerouac to have completed this work in the face of all his personal obstacles. In the same vein, however, perhaps it's best that Hemingway is remembered for his masculine days fishing, bull-fighting, or at war, rather than for his vulnerable days. Because in Big Sur, we get the tragedy come full-circle, and it's not pretty; it is the disheartening tale of how the cold world took the free-spirited hero America had come to love in On the Road and wore him down until he couldn't face it any longer.

2. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry. Though it's considered one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century, this is one book you won't be studying in high school English classes. Which is a shame: the writing in this novel is second to none. The novel's main protagonist, an alcoholic British consul stuck in a tequila-fueled half-life in Mexico, envisions escaping it all by moving to a remote log cabin in the Vancouver woods - a vision to find peace and sobriety in the wildnerness eerily similar to Jack Kerouac's real-life attempt to do the same (see number 1 on this list). Lowry's description of the serenity of the Canadian woods is Hemingway-esque - the salmon in the creek, the scent of the pine needles underneath a tree, the crackle of the fire in the log cabin - and perhaps the greatest piece of descriptive writing I have ever read.

But alas, the novel is not all beauty. "Los Barrachones," (the drunkards) a painting of Medusa hurling drunkards' souls through the flames of hell, is more represenative of the novel as a whole. Our afflicted protagonist stares at the painting, torn between the alcohol demons telling him to take another swig of Mescal and his better judgment telling him to quit for good - a perfect metaphor for alcoholism in general. Of course the alcohol demons win in the novel, time after time, as the reader watches the tragedy unfold.

Although Under the Volcano is a work of fiction, the unfortunate reality is that in order to properly write about alcoholism, you have to go through it yourself. Under the Volcano was the only substantial writing Malcolm Lowry ever produced, largely because of the battles he fought with the bottle in his own life. And it's a shame, because for being the only novel Lowry really produced, Under the Volcano is a damned good one.

3. Leaving Las Vegas, John O'Brien. Two weeks after hearing that his novel Leaving Las Vegas would be made into a Hollywood movie (it's actually a great movie, in which Nicolas Cage nails the role of the alcoholic), O'Brien took his own life. John O'Brien's father claims that the novel was John O'Brien's suicide letter. Think about that. The novel is literally a suicide letter. That alone would make this novel awesome. But it's far more than that.

Unlike anything ever written, O'Brien's novel is a the written mantra of one trying to kill himself with the botlle. You didn't read that wrong. After losing his wife and job and will to go on, the main character in Leaving Las Vegas heads to Vegas to drink until the bottle gets him permanently. One scene that will forever be etched into my memories is when Cage's character wakes up in the middle of the night, violently shaking from a lack of alcohol in his system, and struggles to pour a bottle of vodka into his mouth. There is redemption in this story; the main character finds one last sliver of hope in the world when he falls in love with a Vegas stripper in an unholy yet feel-good meeting of souls. Unlike many popular alcohol stories, though, he isn't saved by God or a vision or even by the love he finds; he drinks himself to death.

4. A Fan's Notes, Frederick Exley. We are always comparing ourselves to the men who came before us: to past generations, to our grandfathers, to our fathers. I'm sure there is something Freudian to it all but I'm too lazy to investigate or care about that. But I've given it a lot of thought myself; I even attempted at one time to write a story centered around the underlying theme of how my own generation (and the lack thereof of meaning in our generation) pales in comparison to the World War II generation of men, the men who fought in Korea, and the Vietnam generation that preceded us - and the ramifications of those resulting feelings of inadequacy.

 Frederick Exley had it worst than most. The son of a New York Giants running back, Exley struggled with the fate of being unable to live up to the image of his uber-succesful hero of a father. And how could he possibly? While some father's pass down their athletic prowess to their sons, all Exley got from his father was an addiction to football and an on-again, off-again relationship with booze, and a resulting stint at a mental institution. Fraught with self-loathing spilling from each page, A Fan's Notes may be the quintessential testament to the failed American dream.

5. The Tender Bar, JR Moehringer - If you're looking for a book about booze but without the evil side of booze, this is the book on this list that you should pick up. Like it did for me, the bar played a critical role in Moehringer's coming of age. Like it did for me, the bar contributed to some of the happiest moments of his young life and contributed to some of the lowest points as well. The Tender Bar is the classic tale of the neighborhood pub. It could be any American bar: the places where people looking to find themselves, people looking to marinate their own regrets in a glass of whiskey, people looking for love, and people not sure what they are looking for flock to on Friday and Saturday nights from Seattle to Boston.

Moehringer's book is a cautionary tale, as well. The Tender Bar is the tale of what has happened at pubs in Dublin and Boston and everywhere else for centuries. Men discover the bar, come back to the bar, come back to the bar again, fall into a routine with the bar, and sometimes - unwittingly - fall into a prison of routine with the bar. In those bars men fall into a monotonous half-life, as their lives become a repetition of simply going through the motions without stopping to admire the world outside the bar. Unlike the other writers/characters that comprise this list, Moehringer discovers this before it's too late - he escapes his bar, although many of his friends who occupied the barstools next to him do not.