Thursday Thirteen: Because a Vision Softly Creeping

Dear Thursday Thirteen players,

The old Thursday Thirteen is dead. Long live Thursday Thirteen! Colleen (looseleafnotes.com) and I, who seem to have been doing Thursday Thirteen the longest, have set up a new Thursday 13 blog at http://newthursday13.blogspot.com. Please give us some time to figure out what we're doing but we hope you will continue to play along.

If you want your blog listed in the sidebar of the new Thursday 13, leave me a note in the comments either here or at the new blog.

So on to Thursday Thirteen!

Many writers, artists, and other visionary folk have turned to substance abuse of some kind (even heavy coffee drinking counts) in order to bring their creative passions to fruition. Here is a list of some of those folks.

1. “I’ve seen a lot of people go down because they attach a harmful substance to their creative process. . . Coffee was part of my process. I used to drink like 14 cups a day… Now, if I want to go to a cafe and write and drink coffee for two hours, I just order them… and I keep diluting it — because it’s not the coffee, it’s the habit.” - Patti Smith (American Singer/Song Writer)

2.“I got very drunk on a nightly basis from the time I was about 19 ’til 32,” Anne Lamott (American writer) said in a PBS interview. She says on her posts on Facebook (which I subscribe to) that she's been sober now for about 28 years and credits her Christian faith.

3. Beethoven(musician) was known to be a heavy drinker and an autopsy performed at his death revealed a shrunken liver.

4. “Addiction has had such an impact on my life and the people I love, and there really is not a lot about it that is funny.” Edie Falco (American actor)

5. Edgar Allen Poe, American poet and writer, is well-known to have used alcohol and opiates.

6. Ernest Hemingway, American writer, drank a lot but denied doing it during his creative periods. “Jeezus Christ! Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes – and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one. Besides, who in hell would mix more than one martini at a time?”

7. “I guess I was trying not to feel anything.” Drug use “has less to do with recreation and more to do with the fact that we need to escape from our brains.” - Johnny Depp (American actor)

8. "I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves . . . I wrote the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down." - Carl Sagan (astronomer and author)

9. "I was seduced into the ACCURSED Habit ignorantly – I had been almost bed ridden for many months with swelling in my knees – in a medical journal I happily met with an account of a cure performed in a similar case … by rubbing in of Laudanum, at the same time taking a given dose internally – it acted like a charm, like a miracle! … At length, the unusual stimulus subsided – the complaint returned – the supposed remedy was recurred to – but I cannot go thro’ the dreary history – Suffice to say, that effects were produced , which acted on me by Terror & Cowardice of PAIN and sudden death" - Samuel Taylor Coolidge (English poet and philosopher)

10. I thought I was gonna die,” - Lady Gaga, (singer/songwriter)

11. “I have an addictive nature . . . an obsessive-compulsive nature – well, I don’t know that’s what it is clinically. But I go to addictive extremes, and before I got sober, that became routine.” - Tobey McGuire (American actor)

12. “I drink moderately.. I do like weed. I have a different outlook on marijuana than America does. My best friend Sasha’s dad was Carl Sagan, the astronomer. He was the biggest pot smoker in the world and he was a genius." - Kirsten Dunst, (American actor)

13. William Faulkner, American author, is also known to have been addicted to alcohol. “A man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.” (Only Faulkner quote on drinking I could find.)

Drugs are bad, m'kay? Don't do drugs!

Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here. I've been playing for a while and this is my 378th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday.