"Did I swear off? I must've been all confused in my mind. No tobacco! Say, it's the goldurn Keeley Cure around here. How do you people get through your day?"
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Before I look up the "Keeley Cure," I'm going to guess it's simply going cold turkey. That's not an astounding educated guess! That's me reading the text the way it was written and comprehending what's being said. But some people suck at comprehension so stating what you've just read in a different way seems impressive to them.
"Keeley Cure"
The Keeley Institute has a Wikipedia entry so you can go read that or read my version of it. I recommend my version of it because it'll be shorter and probably more vulgar. I add the vulgar part because in these days when all information is on the Internet, a blog like this Against the Day blog can only exist if something more is added other than pure information. All the information to understand every reference in a Pynchon novel is already out there. You can find it yourself or you can go to some Pynchon-wiki that does all the work for you. So why does this blog exist?! So that I can concentrate on all the boner references in Pynchon's work while pretending I'm trying to do some sort of academic project!
Anyway, the Keeley Institute was created to cure alcoholism. Doctor Keeley Keeley was the first person to decide that alcoholism didn't occur because the alcoholic didn't have an ounce of that certain something that would have enabled them to be a Green Lantern. No, Dr. Keeley decided alcoholism was a disease! The Keeley Institute's slogan was "Drunkenness is a disease and I can cure it!" I would have gone with "we can cure it" as the Institute's slogan but what do I know? I'm terrible at branding! I'm not even marketing my Mason & Dixon: One Line at a Time blog! Except for that link. That'll be it! It's my secret blog! Keeley probably chose "I can cure it" to emphasize that any other "cure" that didn't include him was a definite hoax.
Let me preface this by saying that I'm the son of an alcoholic father who divorced my mother when I was 2 and was only around enough during the next sixteen years to enable him to not get the moniker "deadbeat." So while I can intellectually wrap my head around the idea that addiction is a disease based on our imperfect genes, I also have to reckon with my emotional intelligence which screams, "Oh. How convenient! You get to abandon me for my entire childhood and then get sober to try to be my adult friend, somehow sidestepping all of the anger and fights and trauma that go along with raising a child which my mother had to deal with every day! And I'm supposed to just go, 'Yeah, well, it was a disease! I get it! I forgive you!' Well fuck that! I'm fairly certain you never gave me a proper Step 9 anyway! Your own son! Disease my ass! You were just a weak-willed selfish shit! Get fucked!"
As you may have noticed, the Internet is my therapist.
So, the Keeley Cure was to inject drunkards with "bichloride of gold" for a week or so. Which the Chums of Chance aren't doing so I guess Chick just sees their rule of no smoking as some method which would cause them to abstain from some vice.
Eventually, Keeley died and, since he was the brand and he'd stuck that "I" in the slogan instead of the "we," the numbers of people who attempted the cure declined until the Institute was simply an old fashioned relic by the 1930s. At that time, according to the Wikiepedia, "most physicians believed that 'drunkards are neurotics and cannot be cured by injections.'" Just a second while I email that statement to my father.
Well, that was actually longer than I thought it would be but still not as long as the Wikipedia. Plus there was that nice therapy session in the middle so I'm glad I wrote it!
"How do you people get through your day?"
Sheesh, Chick. Addict much? That's young person slang for "Why are you being so obvious and up front about serious inner flaws that you should maybe work harder to obfuscate from strangers on the Internet?" But I get it, Chick. I think the same thing every time I meet somebody who doesn't write five to ten blog entries per day. I mean, how do you cope with all of this *waves arms in every direction to indicate the banal cruelty of existence*.
One last serious (maybe?) note about addiction: whatever the cause of addiction, the cure ultimately amounts to the person realizing their life has gone so far off the rails that they know something must change. The "cure" is simply that thing which allows them to keep from engaging in the harmful habit. I believe Alcoholics Anonymous works for so many because it encourages community and help from others (this is also possibly what made the Keeley Institute work for those it worked for. If you read the Wiki, the original location especially became a sort of commune or village for people desperate to change their lives). Community and help from others are things that a person spiraling in addiction deny themselves. They are caught up in the narcissism and drama of their own lives, perhaps drinking to escape one kind of pain, or drinking because they simply feel more ("drinking" can be replaced by any other addictive behavior, of course). But even AA acknowledges that the cure must begin with the person wanting to change. AA is simply there to support that person's decision. It doesn't work as a cure; it works to encourage the "cure" which is the individual wanting to make different, less self-destructive choices. I'm absolutely all in for that kind of community. But it doesn't absolve my father for being a selfish, self-destructive asshole who flushed away our relationship because he couldn't be bothered to stop drinking. He chose to stop when I turned 18 because his own life was a wreck; he never chose to stop when I was 2 or 4 or 8 or 12 when I was hurting thanks to his absence.
