Dark Days: A Memoir

by D. Randall Blythe

I feel a deep need to listen to the remnants of history’s saddest songs, to keep their mournful melody alive on my lips and in my heart.

In summary, I am a semi-famous guy in a pretty well-known heavy metal band who makes a very respectable living touring the world as a glorified t-shirt salesman.

I was surrounded by life, things and people that could have brought me great joy, grand opportunities I wasted because I sat in a haze of alcohol, drugs, and sadness.

I was not abused as a child, I did not grow up in an alcoholic home, and although I have suffered some pretty extreme trauma in my life, I was already drinking alcoholically before the heavy-duty shit really hit the fan.

We do the best we can with the cards we’re dealt.

“He was a drunk. He used to be sober, but he decided to screw it up, so it killed him. He knew better.”

All sober alcoholics consume way too much caffeine. It is a requirement—just ask one of us.

I’m too nerdy, too weird, too much my own quirky self to even attempt to squeeze into what I consider the strangling straight jacket of most societal norms. The few times I have tried, I have failed miserably, as “normal” people can smell something strange on me.

Sitting shiva in the dark days of the past is not the act of mourning for lost time or happiness; it is willfully murdering the only chance we ever have to be happy—right now.

I do not trust the men in power, I do not trust our government,

Like the old saying goes, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

At first I had felt sorry for the old man, for when I looked at him I saw what awaited me if I ever started drinking again: homelessness, delirium tremors, prison or the insane asylum, and finally, a painful, lonely, pathetic death.

But his lack of gratitude and unremitting mooching had aroused my ire, and I was glad when he was gone a few days later. I am a patient man with those who suffer from alcoholism, even the ones in the midst of a good bender, for I have been there myself many times.

But a blatant lack of manners from someone who isn’t currently plastered out of their mind, ancient alcoholic or not, offends me to the point of instilling c...

I don’t want everyone on the planet to get together, hold hands, and sing We Are the World or some hideous feel-good shit like that, I just want people to act like they use their brain for something other than switching TV channels. We do not live in the 1800s anymore, and there is absolutely no excuse for this sort of ignorance.