Shipyard, rounded the Solano wharf, and surged along abreast of
the patch of tules and the clustering fishermen's arks where in
the old days I had lived and drunk deep.

And right here something happened to me, the gravity of which I
never dreamed for many a long year to come. I had had no
intention of stopping at Benicia. The tide favoured, the wind was
fair and howling--glorious sailing for a sailor. Bull Head and
Army Points showed ahead, marking the entrance to Suisun Bay which
I knew was smoking. And yet, when I laid eyes on those fishing
arks lying in the water-front tules, without debate, on the
instant, I put down my tiller, came in on the sheet, and headed
for the shore. On the instant, out of the profound of my brain-
fag, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to drink. I wanted to get
drunk.

The call was imperative. There was no uncertainty about it. More
than anything else in the world, my frayed and frazzled mind
wanted surcease from weariness in the way it knew surcease would
come. And right here is the point. For the first time in my life
I consciously, deliberately, desired to get drunk. It was a new,
a totally different manifestation of John Barleycorn's power. It
was not a body need for alcohol. It was a mental desire. My
over-worked and jaded mind wanted to forget.

And here the point is drawn to its sharpest. Granted my
prodigious brain-fag, nevertheless, had I never drunk in the past,
the thought would never have entered my mind to get drunk now.
Beginning with physical intolerance for alcohol, for years
drinking only for the sake of comradeship and because alcohol was