Absintheurs Anonymous

OK, so these 12 Steps may not be to everyone's taste - a trifle bitter perhaps, but, hey, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down; all I can say is it works for me. As it said on Caravaggio's knife, "No Hope, No Fear" and, personally, I've found utter nihilism to be a quite liberating experience. So, for all those Non-Alcoholics over there in the NAA, if yer unhappy with yer lot, I offer up this solution... Or rather, dissolution.

1. We admitted we were powerless over the endless rationalisations of our own intellect and ultimately egoistic willpower - that our lives had become too managed, too ordered... in short, too damn dull.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than the intellect could restore us to the wild-eyed fervour we felt the first time we saw Iggy Pop live on stage, fuelled by who knows what cocktail of toxic chemicals, and fired up by the primal power of Punk Rock.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the Promethean fire of our own passions.

4. Made a searching and fearless investigation of "morality" and other such essentialist nonsenses.

5. Admitted to the bottom of a glass, to ourselves and to anybody who would listen the exact nature of our wrongs, their wrongs and the wrongs of the world in general.

6. Were entirely ready to have our own bitter nihilism render all these percieved defects of reality as absurd and meaningless as any other set of arbitrary dogma, thus causing us to laugh, to laugh long and hard like some demonic Buddha in a moment of dark satori.

7. Arrogantly defied that ancient archetypal symbol of the Ultimate Ego - the Big I Am, aka God - to deal with His own shortcomings before sticking His nose into our business. Yeah, go on. Smite me, ya bass.

8. Made a list of all the youthful passions we had lost, all the freedoms we had forsaken in the name of Security, all the time and energy we had squandered in the name of Work, as servile minions of corporate Mammon, and became fiercely committed to making up for lost time.

9. Took direct action on such passions whenever they next arose, even when to do so might well cause injury to ourselves.

10. Continued to make our brutal inquest into our own unconscious conditioning and preconceptions and, wherever we found "truths", promptly destroyed them.

11. Sought, through a sustained and systematic derangement of the senses, to improve our conscious contact with the Dionysiac spirit that lives within us all, praying only for the oblivion of our will, through the absolute dissolution of the ego, like a sugar-cube in absinthe... and, of course, for the money to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to all those still addicted to the ideological opiates of superstition and sophistry whether they take the form of monotheist religion, humanist philosophy, liberal-fascist ideology or polynesian cargo-cult... and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Now, if anybody wants to bake this support group with me, you'll find me and my dear friend Madame La Fee, down at the nearest purveyor of the so-called "Green Fairy", a local hostelry which is, quite aptly, named Oblomov's.

Chin chin.