Composed from notes written whilst drinking my second espresso, waiting for my motorcycle to be serviced…

I suppose I am only muttering to myself on paper really. Writing does calm me and does focus me, so that is a good thing. The art niggles away at artists until we create.

Mainly I want to get home and have a beer. So…

The pull of Beer illuminates an interesting challenge to the Determinism which I embrace.

If the weight and momentum of the universe – physics, chemistry, biology, history, politics, society, genes, environment, family and traumas – have brought me this far like a train with its buffers in the small of my back and I don’t have free will, what does it then mean when I am faced with a temptation I know is dangerous and/or destructive?

Has the force of the universe in my vicinity of space-time produced a human (the most sophisticated ape) who can’t say no to the bottle that is calling me with muffled cries of “drink me! It’s cold in here” from the fridge?

I’m doomed by the loss of my mother – when the world was suddenly revealed to me to be a very unsafe place – to be particularly vulnerable not only to depression but to the anxiety that I alleviate temporarily every day with the beer that exacerbates my anxiety and depression the following morning at 5am. (This is addiction. Thanks, history).

At the same time, I am doomed to have become aware of these vulnerabilities and doomed to resist them. It is not a choice, history, etc. blah blah dictates it.

It has produced a human being with a taste for beer and little willpower to resist even though it has also in the same body produced a human being that knows alcohol is a poison that is slowly killing him.

So I am a human who has no choice but to continue as well as no choice but to want to stop.

The full force of the universe, i.e. history, family, genes, environment, trauma, society, etc. gives this organism, me, no choice but to manage or resist my vulnerabilities to depression, alcohol and anxiety.

Given all the above, what will I do this lunchtime and afternoon? Maybe the correct question is not “what will I do?” but “what will happen”.

So let’s be inspired. Sometimes I win, sometimes I win….