Ray's Thought for the Day

Fer a staggeringly great many, drunkards that is, the bottle is a great alternative to whatever. Lotsa these drunkards is what's known in Arkansas, as street angels - home devils. Another more widespread spell, fer em, is mean drunks. From that, follows the spell, courage out of a bottle. So at RGVECB we have done some scientific experiments on a bunch of drunks to see if whiskey bibbin' has any effect on the yellow streaks down yer back. What we found out was that the yellow streaks, in every case reviewed, just reddened up a mite, or turned off a blotchy purple. From these observations we concluded that if yer a coward, whiskey won't help with that. What whiskey will do though, is make a drunkard more irascible and prone to shenanigans displayed towards those the drunkard espies as weak and helpless, not a purty picture.

At some level er another though, ye got to wonder if bein' a drunk is much different from any other hobby that distracts a human or proto human from its integration into civil society as a bread winner. Fer example, starvin' artists come to mind and luckless gamblers.

Why are there so many drunkards, considered as one subset of all hobbyists? Easy that, disappointment. If ye don't get yer way enough in yer integration with the civil society ye find yerself distributed in, ye may become disappointed and take up a hobby. When the hobby becomes compulsive, the hobby overrides other concerns, like food maybe. A flexible civil society is one that takes humans and proto humans dispappointment with civil society into account, then adjusts to accomodate enough of their hobbies, as paying propositions, to make them happier. Inflexible civil societies that don't accomodate many hobbies, are eventually subject to revolutions.
However, it is fairly doubtful, revolution er no, that any civil society will ever go to the extent of accomadating whiskey bibbin' as a paid profession.