An Ecstatic Loneliness: Chapter Three
By Michael Moriarty
web posted September 3, 2012
High School Graduation, 1959! Why that year? First time I was ever drunk.
No, I wasn't "bombed", as they say. I could drive my "first love" home.
After I'd tried to make love to her in the basement of our home … and … well … sex and "true love" don't always go hand in hand, let alone in any other physical connection.
I had just finished four years of Jesuit training in the University of Detroit High School. This hardly makes you prepared for The Sixties.
I don't regret the inhibitions. Kept me out of trouble in my teen years. Even kept me sane at an "Animal Farm" known as Dartmouth College.
Since this chapter seems to be more about drinking than about sex, I was trying to remember my first real hangover and I came up with the day after my High School Graduation.
By then I'd already been well-acquainted with my fall-down drunk, house-burning-down mother. A suicidal drunk headed for death. She escaped such despair with Alcoholics Anonymous. I too, thirty years later, would find myself equally as grateful to AA as my mother had become.
Who was the heart of this familial alcoholism?
My physician father, George Moriarty. A surgeon who kept the "medications" flowing liberally in our Detroit households. He was a functioning alcoholic whom very few people could keep up with.
Drinking is unquestionably a quintessentially Irish addiction and, from my own experience, I think the habit is congenital and can be inherited.
My grandfather, a fairly well-known athlete, a ballplayer for the Detroit Tigers, was not an alcoholic. He'd already seen many of his five brothers drop dead from "The Sauce".
 A very damaged photo of "Big George", the umpire of five world series |
I'd seen my mother and my sister and my step-mother go to hell with "The Sauce". You'd assume that I, like my grandfather, George Moriarty, would know better.
"Big George", as we called him for fear of exposing his age with such diminutives as
"Gramps", had run into many things on the ball field like the Obama Nation. An infinity of cunning cheaters and saboteurs. He was an umpire, a great one – called balls and strikes for five World Series – and there wasn't, if he could smell it out, much cheating going on during the ballgames he ruled over with eagle eyes, a tough, Irish temper and the fists to back that all up with.
Presently we, Irene and I, are in the middle of the 2012 Olympics in London. No, we're not in London at the moment. Merely projecting ourselves there through the television set.
I had already been to London, of course, "once" too often.
Not sure whether I will share the agonizing "once" with you yet.
Too painful for today's Olympian muses.
Take my fearful anticipation as a guarantee, however, that my year, 1963-64, in London will be dealt with at some time during An Ecstatic Loneliness and dealt with in depth.
For now, I'd rather kvell over Missy Franklin and Allison Schmitt and their young brilliance as athletes.
They both seem to be the young and heroic American stars out of imaginary films directed by Frank Capra and Katherine Hepburn … simultaneously!
With a James Stewart, World War II heroism and a Katherine Hepburn fortitude combined with the grace of their Olympian triumphs in the pool!
Missy Franklin and Allison Schmidt, for me at least, are the essence and greatest symbol of this year's Olympics. They almost singlehandedly erase the Leninist arrogance of Danny Boyle and his infuriatingly Marxist opening ceremonies!
 Allison Schmitt |
 Missy Franklin |
May God bless all of their years on Earth … and those they have certainly earned in Heaven as well.
Then, of course, there is the divinely miraculous, US team spirit in the American gymnastics team!
The Great Gymnasts of 2012
Why am I looking so desperately for American heroes and heroines?! They are so needed now with equal desperation!!
We have the indisputably Olympian giant, Michael Phelps! Yet his whole life centers around his divinity when in the water.
What about heroes and heroines on dry land?!
Where's the American Winston Churchill that history now demands in the face of the Obama Nation and the Marxist ownership of not only the White House but Moscow and Beijing as well?!
I believe that such a Churchill aborning will prove to be Allen West.
Until Col. West reaches major office, I will extend my best efforts at keeping Churchill's eternally necessary courage alive and well in my writings … and my music.
I compare my composing to Churchill's beloved hobby of painting.
It is so gratifying to know that the very name of Churchill can infuriate this obscenely arrogant excuse for a President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama!
Meanwhile, I'm slowly, painstakingly, solemnly and lovingly putting together a You Tube video presentation of my Easter Suite For String Quartet, a compilation of sections from my String Quartet # 1. Three movements attempting to capture something of the Easter weekend, from the incomprehensibly miraculous sacrifice of Good Friday to the purgatorial wilderness of Holy Saturday to the joyous liberations of Easter Sunday.
I hope and trust I can complete this project by Christmas.
If not, it will certainly have a most auspicious debut at Easter of 2013!
Until then and my next chapter, all God ever wanted from me is more of what I am. More of what He made me! 
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com.