Blackout Drinking! Uh, Where Did I Leave That Masterpiece?

MSNBC is reporting the story of the man who lost a valuable artwork while "blackout" drinking, here's their story:

"Call it the lost art of drinking responsibly: A man entrusted with helping to sell a $1.3 million painting said it disappeared while he was in a drunken haze, according to a lawsuit filed by a co-owner of the canvas.  James Carl Haggerty took the painting — noted French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's circa 1857 'Portrait of a Girl'— to a Manhattan hotel on July 28 for a potential buyer to examine, Kristyn Trudgeon's lawsuit said. Then Haggerty hung out at the hotel bar and was seen on security cameras leaving the building with the painting after midnight, according to the lawsuit.

But there was no sign of the portrait on the cameras at his Manhattan apartment building when he got home nearly two hours later, the lawsuit said.  And the next morning, Haggerty told painting co-owner Thomas A. Doyle III he 'could not recall its whereabouts, citing that he had had too much to drink the previous evening,' according to the lawsuit filed Monday in a Manhattan state court.

[Ms.] Trudgeon is seeking what she says is the roughly $1.3 million value of the painting, which spent years in the collection of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, according to museum spokeswoman Sarah Stifler.

News service Bloomberg reported that Haggerty would have made $25,000 if the painting, which shows a young woman with a steady gaze, wide forehead and white lace collar, was sold.  A London dealer, Offer Waterman, had been interested in buying the picture, Bloomberg cited the complaint as saying.

Haggerty didn't immediately return phone messages left Tuesday at two possible home numbers for him and at his office at a company that leases out private jets.  Doyle isn't involved in the lawsuit and didn't return a message left for him at his office at the same jet company. He is a friend of Haggerty's and involved him in the effort to sell the painting, according to Trudgeon's lawyer, Max Di Fabio.

Corot, who lived from 1796 to 1875, was an important figure among the proto-Impressionist group known as the Barbizon School. Members turned their backs on Parisian urbanity to embrace a back-to-the-land emphasis on painting scenes of rural French life, often doing their artwork outdoors.

Trudgeon, who also was acquainted with Haggerty, owns a small portion of the painting, Di Fabio said. He said he had no information on whether it was insured.  Trudgeon 'was terribly hurt and dismayed and disappointed,' Di Fabio said. 'She just would like some answers.'"
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The answer is "blackout drinking."  The man entrusted with this painting , is a drunk.  He had so anesthetized himself he genuinely has no idea what he did with your painting.  In the years when I actively drank like this, "pig drinking" I would awaken and wonder how I got home, where my car was, did I hurt anyone, what I had done, how I would pull myself together to do what laid ahead that day, and so on.

For those of you who are not drunks, let me explain the irrationality of alcoholic drinking.  It is not the tenth drink that destroys you, it is the first.  You take a drink and you can not predict where your drinking will take you.  There is an apt Chinese saying: first the man takes the drink, then the drink takes the drink, finally the drink takes the man.  In other words, it is not the caboose of the train that kills you, it's the engine.  And when you are alcoholic, the drinking and the thinking combine in a whiplash to destroy lives and the sanity of the drunk and those in the lives of the drunk.