CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN BECAUSE
Okay.
So she goes to these places—these parties, bars, get-togethers of friends within whom she is an outlier—she goes to these places, and she gets herself good and lost drunk. Drinks until everything is white space and outside stimuli materialize only when within inches of her. Nobody exists until they give her stupid eye compliments and jacket compliments. Her words all melt into oozy syllables, sentences into oozy flirtations with people she mostly doesn't want to flirt with. Walks home are long, unobstructed paths of desert, with doors and elevators springing up at their appropriate places.
She drinks like this because she has to drink like this, but no one would believe her if she said so, so she drinks like this without excusing herself. She drinks like this because there are 24 hours—fucking hours—in every day, and she can fill at most 9 or 10 of them with work and 8 or 9 with sleep. There's eating and shitting and showering of course, but these do not take up the 5-7 remaining hours per day. She used to take laxatives, to keep her on the toilet all night (skinny, also), but it didn't solve anything. The toilet or the skinny.
She drinks like she does because there are babies yet unborn and babies who never will be, because evolution is too gradual a change for her.
There is a fetal groove in her bed like depressed, wooden footprints at a monk's favorite place of prayer and that is why she drinks like this. She cut off her internet and canceled all her subscriptions but this has only served to keep her out of date in conversation with the other lushes down at Barney's.
She imagines God as a savage Forrest Whitaker, inhaling deeply the rot of burned flesh—sacrificial and otherwise. She imagines God as sleeping off a bender, the phone ringing without pause for days and weeks. She imagines God as an asterisk, and that is why she drinks like this.
Okay.
So she goes to these places—these parties, bars, get-togethers of friends within whom she is an outlier—she goes to these places, and she gets herself good and lost drunk. Drinks until everything is white space and outside stimuli materialize only when within inches of her. Nobody exists until they give her stupid eye compliments and jacket compliments. Her words all melt into oozy syllables, sentences into oozy flirtations with people she mostly doesn't want to flirt with. Walks home are long, unobstructed paths of desert, with doors and elevators springing up at their appropriate places.
She drinks like this because she has to drink like this, but no one would believe her if she said so, so she drinks like this without excusing herself. She drinks like this because there are 24 hours—fucking hours—in every day, and she can fill at most 9 or 10 of them with work and 8 or 9 with sleep. There's eating and shitting and showering of course, but these do not take up the 5-7 remaining hours per day. She used to take laxatives, to keep her on the toilet all night (skinny, also), but it didn't solve anything. The toilet or the skinny.
She drinks like she does because there are babies yet unborn and babies who never will be, because evolution is too gradual a change for her.
There is a fetal groove in her bed like depressed, wooden footprints at a monk's favorite place of prayer and that is why she drinks like this. She cut off her internet and canceled all her subscriptions but this has only served to keep her out of date in conversation with the other lushes down at Barney's.
She imagines God as a savage Forrest Whitaker, inhaling deeply the rot of burned flesh—sacrificial and otherwise. She imagines God as sleeping off a bender, the phone ringing without pause for days and weeks. She imagines God as an asterisk, and that is why she drinks like this.
J
“The dawn of time was a political action conference in Hoboken,” she says when she won't remember it.
K
“The dawn of time,” she says. “Was a period of popsicle stick log cabins and great, smelly heat.”
J
“The dawn of time was a political action conference in Hoboken,” she says when she won't remember it.
K
“The dawn of time,” she says. “Was a period of popsicle stick log cabins and great, smelly heat.”
J
She says, “the dawn of time is no more or less important than now or this exact moment 10 years ago (we were entering a gas station in Georgia, remember?).”
She says this while holding:
a.) a lighter, which she flicks with diasporic nerves?
b.) a beer can, propped level with her crooked elbow?
c.) a steak knife, flush against her thumb?
Well, which is it?
If you chose a.) then congratulations. You have given her cancer. Sludgy, motor oil-blood for her veins, the works.
b.) is cirrhosis or a car crash, I think. Perhaps just poor health, old age or ill-gotten fat.
c.) the power is in her hands. She will finish her steak or veal parmigiana, rise calmly from the table and speak in tongues until she doesn't. If she so chooses. Or probably, she'll ask for seconds and a drink.
She says this while holding:
a.) a lighter, which she flicks with diasporic nerves?
b.) a beer can, propped level with her crooked elbow?
c.) a steak knife, flush against her thumb?
Well, which is it?
If you chose a.) then congratulations. You have given her cancer. Sludgy, motor oil-blood for her veins, the works.
b.) is cirrhosis or a car crash, I think. Perhaps just poor health, old age or ill-gotten fat.
c.) the power is in her hands. She will finish her steak or veal parmigiana, rise calmly from the table and speak in tongues until she doesn't. If she so chooses. Or probably, she'll ask for seconds and a drink.