| fatfoo |
02-17-2010 03:56 PM |
So, being a webmaster is creative. I think that's true.
Some people tell me alcohol and drugs increases their creativity. It is true?
Well, I read an interview with the famous author Stephen King. Stephen King says he tried cocaine and other hard drugs, but they did not increase his creativity. He says the hard drugs do not increase his creativity in the writing.
Here is part of the interview between Stephen King and Tim Adams:
SK: I wanted to see what was in the name, but I also wanted to publish those books. They thought I would clog the market. They weren't really Stephen King books as it was then understood, they were short for a start.
TA: Do you worry that there is an element of chance in your success?
SK: Not worried, but curious. Curious to know whether there's something in me, or whether I just won the publishing lottery. And I guess its both. But primarily a lot of things came together for me at around the time of Carrie. The book, and the film that was successful. But even then I was not the blue-eyed boy of the season. Peter Benchley was. And where is he now?
TA: Did you feel a pressure to repeat the success, after your career took off?
SK: No it was always a pleasure to write. I can never think of a time when I just hacked something out to fulfil a contract or meet a deadline. I might have hacked things out, but it was always stuff I loved.
TA: Did the alcohol ever get in the way?
SK: With alcohol I was just an alcoholic personality. But it was a slow growing thing, compared to the drugs, that is I drank x amount in 1975 and in 1976 it was maybe x plus 20.
TA: And always beer?
SK: Well, beer was what I wanted, but if I couldn't get beer, I'd drink anything else really. The drugs were different. With cocaine, one snort, and it just owned me body and soul. Something in my system wanted that, and once cocaine was there it was like the missing link: click. Like when you turn on lights it's on or off, there's no half way. Cocaine was like my 'on' switch. I started in 79 I guess. Did it for about eight years. Not a terribly long time to be an addict I guess, but it is longer than World War II. [Laughs] And that's how it felt a lot of the time. I didn't really hide my drinking, but I hid my drugs because I knew right away it was a problem. Nobody lives one day at a time like a drug addict. You don't think yesterday or tomorrow. You just think now, where is it. I was high much of the eighties, and I'm not a very reflective person, so it never crossed my mind that it was an existential thing, or that it was wasteful or anything else. It was just what I was doing that day
TA: In your book you talk about the effect drinking had on the books. What effect did it have on family?
SK: It's tough to say. I hid it pretty well, in that they never really knew what was distorting my mood. The tide goes in, the tide goes out and if you don't know that its the moon pulling those tides you still know when its safe to go to the beach.
TA: Were you lucid most of the time?
SK: My wife has told me since that I was hungover every mornng until about two in the afternoon, and from five until midnight I was drunk out of my mind. So she says there was this period of about three hours when she could talk to me like a rational human being...
TA: That must have been pretty tough on her and the kids?
SK: Well, I suppose it must have had an effect. I was never the guy who said 'lets have a gin and tonic before dinner.' I'd have to have like twelve gin and tonics and then I'd have to say 'fuck dinner' and have twelve more. So I guess that was difficult to live with from time to time.
TA: Why did she stay with you?
SK: Well she stuck. But she made it clear that she wouldn't stick if I didn't clean up my act... But that was after maybe twenty years. I mean the first time we ever went out I got loaded.
TA: What kind of a drunk were you. Was Jack Torrance [of The Shining] for example, ever close to home?
SK: It never about swinging from the chandeliers or throwing people through the window, or getting laid, or partying. I didn't go to bars much. One drunken asshole was all I could handle and that was me. I wrote. I don't remember a lot of it. The kids accepted my drinking as a part of life. Not a particularly pernicious part. I didn't beat up on them. Basically I don't think I was so different from a lot of dads who have three or four martinis when they get in from work, wine with dinner and so on.
TA: Well, maybe a little different...
SK: There's a story I loved about this big blizzard in 76, much worse than the perfect storm, it paralysed everything. The outside world looked like fucking Venus or something: no houses, just snow. Boston was shut down for 12 days and the commuter trains were stranded, and the commuters were taken to school gymnasiums. And that night, the police were forced to break into liquor stores, no word of a lie, because these businessmen were getting delirium tremors, they were scaring the children, because they were not used to life where they couldn't get a shot of whiskey at five or six o'clock. So its a fairly oiled society. And I wasn't much more out of control than anyone else.
TA: What about your health... have their been lasting effects?
SK: I like to think my coke addiction was a blessing in disguise, because I think without coke, I'd have gone on drinking until about the age of fifty-five and it would have been in the New York Times, 'writer Steven King dies of stroke'. Once you add the coke, you eventiually tip over, because I know from experience that stuff eats you from the inside out...
TA: When that point came, when your wife emptied all your empties and crap on floor in 1987, did you clean up straight away?
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