I am no Nostradamus, that’s for sure.

Here’s what I predicted would go down in 2011:

Film: The following Oscar wins:  The Social Network (Picture and Adapted Screenplay, Director), Firth (Actor), Bale (Supp. Actor, The Fighter)Portman (Actress, Black Swan), Leo (Supp. Actress, The Fighter),Inception (Original Screenplay)

Bale, Portman, Firth and Leo won Oscars but there were tribesmen in distant corners of the Amazon who saw that coming.

Politics: winnersNational (NZ) governs in its own right, Coalition (NSW) thumps the ALP, Obama (Gallup approval average rises to 51.5 for calendar 2011), Huckabee emerges as strong consensus possibility for GOP pres. nod by October.

National can’t quite govern in its own right, but not far off.  There are pot plants who knew that the ALP was set to lose big in NSW.  Obama’s Gallup average for 2011 was way short of 51.5 . hovering in the low-mid forties.  And Huckabee?  What was I thinking?

Random Peter Dunne bolts to National; Goff promotes Shane Jones by Feb as part of a “Hail Mary” reshuffle; Anne Tolley is demoted before the election due to inescapable incompetence, Gillard fires Rudd and retakes Newspoll lead with surge of national relief

Not even close.

Sport: All Blacks win Rugby World Cup. That’s all.

Got this right. The consequences of otherwise were too horrendous for me to contemplate.

Media: NY Times pay-wall exceeds expectations; Twitter IPO announced for 2012; Fairfax struggles; Google tablet challenge sinks and stock price drops

The NY Times has achieved modest success with its new paywall.  Twitter hasn’t listed and Google hasn’t released a proprietary tablet, although the Android equivalent is sluggish.  Stupid predictions anyway, given my expertise in this area is roughly equivalent to that remote tribesperson I mention.

You may find yourself resisting this sentimental pageant of early-20th-century rural English life, replete with verdant fields, muddy tweeds and damp turnips, but my strong advice is to surrender. Allow your sped-up, modern, movie-going metabolism, accelerated by a diet of frantic digital confections — including Mr. Spielberg’s just-released “Adventures of Tintin” — to calm down a bit. Suppress your instinctive impatience, quiet the snarky voice in your head and allow yourself to recall, or perhaps to discover, the deep pleasures of sincerity.

After having my fill of romantic comedies with titles like I Can’t Believe My Luck or It Makes Me Feel Funny When You look At Me Like That (And Not In a Good Way), I have spent the past two nights reacquainting myself with the action movie genre.  On Saturday night, I watched a Jason Statham thriller, Blitz, and last night I saw Fast Five* starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and an actor known as The Rock (alternative title: A Surfeit of Tops).

In Blitz, Statham plays Tom Brant, a volatile British police officer in pursuit of a serial cop killer whose murderous rampage was triggered by Brant’s own brutality.  Director Elliot Lester takes the considerable irony available to him in that premise  – and utterly and gleefully squanders it. But, really, who cares?  The one thing worse than an amoral revenge fantasy is one that thinks it’s more than that.  Bemoaning the absence of narrative texture in a Jason Statham movie is like refusing to tip a prostitute because she is a climate sceptic.  In fact, I can’t think of a single Statham flick where the tagline “What Do You Expect?” wouldn’t work perfectly well.

Unlikely as it seems, Fast Five involves even more gravelly-voiced one-liners than Blitz.  In fact, the latest in the (phenomenally fatuous) Fast and Furious franchise contains about as many attempts to coin catchphrases as it does car stunts (not a phrase, by the way, I would try repeating twelve times in front of my mother).  This is particularly true of the Vin Diesel, the aptly-named “Dom”, who spends the entire film delivering portentous-sounding inanities like these I have made up because I am too lazy to actually write them down:

Female foil

But why, Dom? It’s a suicide mission.

Dom

Not trying to survive. That’s suicide.

______

Asian sidekick

Why’d you let him win, Dom?

Dom

Sometimes losing’s winning, man.

______

Fast-talking Black Guy

You some crazy motherfucker, Dom. This is insane!

Dom

You want sanity?  You picked the wrong fucking planet, man.

Pause, heavily pregnant

We all did.

These came so thick and fast that I assumed the film, like so many of its genre cohorts, was scripted by a roomful of screenwriters locked in a fierce (as well as fast and furious) race to the bottom of the action-movie-cliche-barrel.  So imagine my surprise when it turned out that Fast Five has a solitary screenwriting credit:  Chris Morgan.

This is impressive. Mr Morgan must be  hoot at dinner parties.

Guest

So, Chris, I hear you’re a screenwriter.  Would I know any of your work?

Morgan

Depends.  Do you know Get the Fuck Outta My Face?

Guest

I beg your pardon?

Morgan

Nobody likes no beggar.

Guest

I’m sorry?

Morgan

You don’t even know what sorry is.

Host

Now, Chris, be nice.  We talked about this.

Morgan

You wanna talk? Talk to my itchy fist.

*Not to be confused with the porn parody, Fist Fave. 

Last night, in the absence of much else to do, I watched a romantic comedy starring Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and (of course) Paul Rudd. It was called Don’t Mind me Asking or Can You Tell What I’m Thinking or You Ought to Know That or something. By its cast and title, you can tell that this is the kind of movie that might well have been generated by software designed to maximise box office and minimize creative effort: romcom.com?

It was testament to a shortage of alternatives and imagination on my part that I watched Don’t Look at Me Like That, Please from start to finish, even though the second half was punctuated by sudden screen freezes that lasted for several minutes before jumping ahead several scenes. I think I missed several critical moments such as the plot.  All in all, the DVD scratches added about an hour to the duration of Hey, Are You Busy Thursday?, which meant that 90 minutes of my life that I will never get back exploded into a fully irrecoverable two and a half hours.  (Did I mention that Jack Nicholson appeared in the film, too?  For a moment I thought it could have been an Andy Serkis digital rendering of Jack Nicholson until I realised that not even the wizards at Weta Digital could reproduce that kind of smug listlessness).

As I have discussed before, same-sex attraction appears to have no readily identifiable origin in the form of a “gay gene”.  Born This Way, the mantra of Liz Taylor’s successor’s as fag-hag to the universe, Lady Gaga, is a wonderful and empowering idea — much like Women Can Do Anything, a feminist catch-cry of the last century – without being strictly true in the true or false sense of the word.

If, however, there turns out to be a gay gene after all, my guess is that it would sit in close alignment to that part of our DNA that enables us to endure bad romantic comedies.  (On the other hand, we appear to be equipped with an exceptionally low tolerance for action flicks, with the obvious exception of anything starring Jason Statham).

Sure, straight men can enjoy romcoms, too.  But, girls. Listen to me. if your boyfriend can sit through Just So You Know For Next Time or whatever the shimmering turd of a film I watched last night was called, then you need to re-examine the basis of your relationship.  It’s time to run the checklist:

1. Is he currently in the process of trying to get in my pants for the first time? (This will cause straight men to mimic gay symptoms like sensitivity, good taste and not burping in public). IF YES, GO TO 6.
2. Does he own cartoon-themed boxer shorts? IF YES, GO TO 6
3. Does he have Adele, Beyonce or any of the songs from Billy Elliot on his iPod?  IF NO OR “DOESN’T HAVE AN IPOD”, GO TO 6
4. Is the retail value of his toiletries bag and contents therein (excluding items you have bought for him) more or less than USD$500?  IF LESS, GO TO 6
5. Have gone to 6 yet?  If YES, WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE THEN?
6. Relax, he’s probably straight.

If you’re still looking for answers, you should be.

……

The scraps of memory that survived my decade-long alcoholic bender have congealed like papier-mâché into formless clumps. I can make no sense of them. Patches of recollection: a face here, a place there; hazy half-stories inflated by embellishment or reworked to fit a punchline.

With few enough exceptions to keep count on both hands, I drank between twenty and thirty beers every day between my coming out as gay in late 2007 unil the moment I staggered into a Melbourne detox clinic five years ago this month.

I had masterfully engineered a lifestyle that enabled me to drink in stupendous quantities with minimal outward consequences. I did not own a car. I effortlessly avoided relationships. I lived in a series of rented rooms, located nearby to my favoured watering holes so that the stumble home was short and straightforward. Aside from work, at which I pushed my luck to the nth degree, I had no obligations to speak of; or at least none that could not be easily met half-drunk or fully hungover. All my friends drank—although few as much as me. In any event, It turns out that there are very few places, activities or events to which an adult in Australia cannot, with the minimum of effort, add alcohol. That said, I was well past the need for an excuse.

As a child, I had a reaction to the sight of drunk people that bordered on a phobia. Aged about six, a family friend stumbled and fell on top me in our living room during the course of some booze-fuelled shenanigans. My mother’s father, a man whose journals later revealed Joycean depths of Catholic guilt and self-loathing, was a hard drinker whose prickly sarcasm was the stuff of nightmares for a tender child like me. My father’s father died many years before, also in the shadow of grog. My own parents drank modestly, still do in fact, but my mother would happily eradicate booze from the face of the earth if she could. Understandable when you consider her father—and her son.

This is not a family-tree defense. Far from it.

All the certitude and repetition in the world cannot make true the claim—ubiquitous in the addiction industry—that alcoholism is a chronic disease passed from generation to generation. Claude Steele, a social psychologist who has done pioneering research in the field, told me earlier this year that such views are “primarily the product of wishful thinking, not science; as far as anyone knows, there is no evidence that alcoholism is hereditary in a strict genetic sense.” No matter how robust or conclusive the contradictory evidence, the appealing idea that an alcoholic was born with a pre-existing medical condition – and an immutable genetic fact of life – seems impossible to shake. It is a seductive storyline. To a newly-minted sober drunk arriving flustered and self-conscious to their first AA meeting, the appeal of the disease theory is obvious: “We are like diabetics and our insulin is abstinence!” In other words, the shambles you have made of your life — and the untold carnage left in its wake — is, at least partly, beyond your control . For families and loved ones, as well as for the community at large, the “addiction is diabetes, abstinence is insulin” storyline helps them comprehend the destructive choices addicts make; find “closure” and “move on”. Medical science, Oprah-style.

However overblown the disease theory of alcoholism, there is no denying a physical component to addiction. By the final year or so of my drinking, I was so badly affected by DTs that I would sneak home for 15 minutes before heading to the pub so that I could wrestle to my lips the two cans of VB necessary to quell the debilitating tremor. By the time I arrived at the pub, I had the rock-like steadiness of a spinal surgeon.

Symptoms like hand tremors and headaches are common with alcohol withdrawal, and the more you drank the worse they get. In the critical 72 hours after the last drink, in rare cases, some chronic alcoholics have been known to die as the result of seizures.

But after a medically supervised ‘drying-out’ period of 3-5 days, such symptoms naturally subside. The untold story of alcoholism is that the physical compulsion to drink is relatively easy to overcome. The bad news Is that for as many as 95 percent of those who complete detox but relapse in the aftermath, sobriety turns out to be even easier to quit.

____________

For at least three straight years, I slept every night on a same bare mattress using the same large red towel in lieu of sheets and a duvet. (It also doubled as my towel). Because I drooled copiously as I slept, and wet myself routinely, the mattress had a 19th century asylum quality. The room itself was what would have happened had painter Hieronymus Bosch chosen interior decorating over biblical hellscapes.

“You need to fumigate this place”, my friend told me the morning I arrived home from the clinic. I was shocked at seeing her—or any other human being for that matter—in the room. “You weren’t supposed to come in here,” I told her. My face burned. “It’s ok,” she lied. “I’ve seen worse”.

I keep coming back to memory.

September 11, for example, is reduced to a rapid, out-of-focus montage. A phone call from a friend I had just finished drinking with. A housemate, in tears, emerges from her bedroom. The television, a pixelated haze; disbelieving, indecipherable voices. Too much for my swirling, inebriated mind, I slept, waking six hours later, still drunk, oblivious to the events of the night before, until the anguished faces on the tram brought it flooding back. Something about the end of the world. Ideal day, I thought, for a pub lunch.

Days into weeks into months into years. Drinking through and over and underneath whatever came my way.

None of this is to say that alcohol did this to me. Of course it didn’t. Alcohol has power only to sit in bottles and glasses until free agents like me pour it down our willing throats. I did not drink in spite of its mind-scrambling effects but to conjure them. Drunks choose the pixelated haze. Few days pass when, for a fleeting moment at least, I don’t envy them for it.

Inebriation makes perfect sense to a distraught mind – and every such mind, to borrow a little from Tolstoy, is distraught in its own way.*

In my case, I dealt with my burgeoning homosexuality in adolescence by pushing it to one side in favour of a persona designed to project normalcy; a kind of deception directed mainly at myself. Such coping strategies have a limited shelf-life and, by my late-twenties, I could no longer reconcile what I knew of myself with the world I had created around me. I came out as gay in late 1997, firstly to my then-wife, shortly followed by the rest of the known universe.

Hopelessly ill-prepared for life as a gay man, or adult life in any form, I found solace and company in pubs and blessed, daily relief in intoxication. I had uncovered my new hiding place.

For these five years, I have played this scene in my head over and over.

A camera pirouettes, taking in the sights and sounds, the bustle and optimism of a New York morning. David Gray provides the soundtrack, ragged but not without hope. It has been a harrowing ride. The audience has earned its reward, delivered finally by the sight of me, or someone playing me, emerging from the subway, fit and sober, looking upwards and over, way past the camera, right down the barrel of whatever comes next.

In real life, such satisfying narrative arcs have a way of flatlining. Which is not to say I didn’t get fit and sober. I did. I worked out every day. Did yoga, without irony. Lost 20kg, grew a fleeting six-pack. Blossomed professionally, at least for a time. I even lived the dream in New York for a couple of years until it overwhelmed me.

In the end, abstinence from alcohol has merely brought me full circle, back to the point at which I decided drinking myself to oblivion was preferable to not doing so. It is some kind of achievement, sure. It is the basis for something. But I have learned this much over five long sober years: redemption is elusive prey, and heroic second acts are far easier written than lived.

*opening line of Anna Karenina: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.