Those Poor Drunk People

Sweet Jesus. So I haven't posted since October? Terribly sorry about that. Not that anyone reads this thing anyway. Yes, let's see here... yep, by the looks of things traffic has always been, and continues to be, a very definitive zero, which I guess means I'm neither ahead nor behind, just in a weird, non-living state of paralysis of sorts, so...

ANYWAY.

This morning it hit me, what is surely one of the greatest modern quandaries out there: what did all the drunk people do for emotional release before the advent of the telephone? Drunk-dialing seems so commonplace nowadays, even passé, dare I say, what with texting and any given impersonal communication flavor of the week, but what the heck did all those hoards of inebriates do when they were hanging out and getting wasted in saloons and neared that I-guess-I'm-feeling-vulnerable-enough-to-tell-her/him state in which they thought it prudent to contact some poor sober soul and spill their guts out to him/her, that apparent long-lost lover on the other side of town or the county or the country or whatever?

Did they break away from the barroom brawls and people swinging on chandeliers and other assorted tomfoolery to teeter-totter up to their room, or maybe through the tumbleweeds and down to the general store, and (I'm imagining this by candlelight) scrawl a poorly worded, mostly illegible letter and stumble it, in spurs, to the local post office or mailbox (if they even had those?)? Did they remember to get stamps along the way? OK no. Well wait a minute, what if they couldn't even read or write in the first place? Because that would obviously pose significant problems. What then, huh? Maybe they just grabbed the nearest person who knew how to read and write and straight-up verbalized - probably pretty passionately, with sweat dripping down their brow, with phlegm flying from their mouth that was in no way intended for a spittoon - what they wished to be emoted by ink and quill. But how awkward would that be for the scribe? Psh.

Maybe this is the whole Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs thing coming into play (clever bastard); you know, as you saunter home from the saloon and up your front lawn you're likely to care first and foremost about, say, making sure a wolf hasn't plowed through your whole lot of sheep while you were out hootin' and hollerin' with your drinking buddies before you decide to cruise Facebook at 3 a.m., haphazardly poking your crushes, and even complete strangers, in your e-warpath. It just kinda works that way.

So take all of this, got it?, k, and think now of all that bottled-up emotion - the pent-up sentiments and years of emotional solitude spread out over varying BAC levels (usually pretty high ones considering all of that moonshine and whiskey, or so I've read) - and what've you got? What you've got are barrels full of volatile little man hearts strapped with lit sticks of TNT, getting absolutely plastered in the proximity of women in bustiers and various corralled animals is what you've got. And that's pretty damn scary. Laws (the few that existed) were practically begging to be broken.

Or maybe there were just a lot more face-to-face confessions and confrontations, which would have rocked something fierce to witness. Can you imagine? I barely can, this tarnation. And just think: these people in these impaired hullabaloos were usually carrying guns. My God. Talk about being guilted into love. What if your assailant/lover-to-be was packing eyes full of tears, veins full of booze and a hip holster full of lead?

OK, OK! I'll marry you!