The celebrated author staggered back against the stool, his glass broke, and everyone turned. The author’s face was red around unlooking eyes. Before the bartender could yell, the girl clasped the boy's hand and ran through the door.

“You punched Frank Dickey,” she said.

“He touched your thigh,” he said.

She kissed him on the sidewalk as the rain fell.

Her writing carried her to a tenure track; his dropped him off at retail management. They split before she studied abroad the next semester, so they did not have Paris, but they always had the curb outside the college dive.

I sink into the sofa and grab the remote flicking through the channels with the hope that something attracts my attention. Anything. Anything to distract me from it.

I know it’s watching me.

I can feel its acidic stare watching my every move.

I’ve tried reading, I’ve tried running on the treadmill -which lasted the grand total of 10 minutes- I’ve tried Skype calling a friend but they didn’t answer, all the while knowing it is there.

Sitting on its lofty shelf peering down on me with a condescending glare.

In lockdown, there’s nowhere to go. I can’t avoid it.

Whatever I do I feel its presence like an over-eager spectator who’s reaching out to be part of the performance.

I hold out to 3pm. Then I concede and take it down.

My tormentor, my silent observer, my solitary friend and enemy, all blended and distilled together as one, in a bottle.

Tell me

is this what drowning feels like?

Numb, with vibrant cheeks

Empty, with full feeling.

my hands are shaking

letting liquid lies slip through my

steady fingers

(I know what I want; but I don’t).

is this what

d

r

o

w

n

i

n

g

feels like?

tiptoeing over problems with heavy limbs,

holding pleasure never.

vibrating with life, as I die

free, as I am trapped in alcohols illusion.

I am

s i n k i n g

slowly

weightlessly

heavily

fast.

drifting

into clouds of thick

moisture

choking on

sugared oceans

of endless

misery.

is this what drowning feels like?

when you are

submerged

in merky memories

intoxicated

by different realities

as you wistfully pour more

liquid

down

your throat

instead of swimming to the surface

to face the reality of the cold air

...

Yes...this is...what...drowning...feels like...

I could not see my opponents eyes behind her face mask, but I knew they were in there watching me as she intended to give me all she got, ready to pummel me, blow after blow after blow upside my head, hammering into my meaninglessness, but I had no intentions of giving up.

At first I said without clenched fists,

"No, no, no. That's not for me; no thank you ma'am," waving my pointer finger back and forth right up in her face and she just decided to humor me, walking away from our fight all high and mighty knowing she'd be back, unceremoniously whispering,

"Fat chance. We all know who's gonna win this one when the fat lady sings."

Like a windswept egg dropped from its nest onto the pavement, it came upon me so suddenly with the refusal still glued to my tongue, the pressure mounting and mounting until I believed I had no choice but to walk out to the end of the pier.

"Oh, that's how it is," as I decided the time had come to surrender. So I said,

"Hit me. Hit me again and again till my bruised skin falls off and jumps in the boat with the pain and I don't even need to watch because I can already hear them all singing,

"Row row row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream."

After some time, one by one, uninvited, from the point of no return, the boats began to come back and I told them to stop but there was no one left within them to navigate, so naturally they began to amass, to pile up, stacking themselves so haphazardly suffocating everything near and dear, including me.

"Excuse me! Excuse me!" I said to her waving my fists in the air, "Do you think we can start over?"

And my unmasked opponent said to me, "You do know you already crossed the finish line, don't you?" Fat chance."

I am not against the use of alcohol, although, like cigarettes, there should be warning labels on the bottles saying such things as: If you drink and drive, your odds go way down to stay alive.” “Think Before You Drink.” “Drink in Moderation before your liver gets a Perforation.” So no, I am not antialcoholic, but I am anti-social of those who think nothing of another human beings life.

A better bet would be to drink a nonalcoholic drink less than 0.5% in overall volume.

For those still living in the Stone Age, alcoholism is an addiction just like a drug. It can cause liver and kidney damage, and eventually kill you. It is a disease that once entered into the bloodstream on a continued basis, takes away your willpower, but it also takes away your friends, destroys your family, leaves you unemployed and takes away whatever self-respect you have for yourself.

And there is nothing worse than having two alcoholics side by side talking trash with and to each other. It’s a comedy of errors in every sense of the word.

Drunk #1: If I were preshadent, I would change a lot of things.

Drunk #2: Me too.

Drunk#1: I wanna be preshadent. You can’t be preshadent if I’m preshadent.

Drunk#2: I can if I wanna be. Let’s have another drink?

Drunk#1: Okay. What were we talking about?

Drunk#2: Me being preshadent.

Drunk#1: Yeah. You’d be good at it.

This simply shows the short attention span they have, and in some cases, alcoholics revert to violence.

But how bad can it get? How about burning down Aqua-Velva After Shave Lotion just to get to the raw alcohol content and drink it? Same thing with rubbing alcohol.

No matter how you look at this, alcohol is dangerous.

Ethanol and water are the main components of most alcoholic beverages, although in some very sweet liqueurs the sugar content can be higher than the ethanol content. Ethanol (CAS Reg. No. 64–17–5) is present in alcoholic beverages as a consequence of the fermentation of carbohydrates with yeast.

Think about that. Ethanol. Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colorless liquid with a slight characteristic odor. Is it any wonder why alcohol is so dangerous.

Ethanol is an important industrial chemical; it is used as a solvent, in the synthesis of other organic chemicals, and as an additive to automotive gasoline (forming a mixture known as a gasohol).

And yet millions of people consume alcohol every day with the additive ethanol.

And make no mistake, both beer and wine is an alcohol.

Here is something to consider; In 2016, 10,497 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for 28% of all traffic-related deaths in the United States. Of the 1,233 traffic deaths among children ages 0 to 14 years in 2016, 214 (17%) were involved in an alcohol-impaired driver. In 2019, 40 people in the United States died in drunk-driving crashes—that's one person every 40 minutes. These deaths have fallen by a third in the last three decades; however, drunk-driving crashes have now risen again and have claimed more than 14,000 lives per year.

Consider this an education. Consider it a warning. You put your life and the lives of others at risk when drinking.

There are AA ( Alcoholics Anonymous) groups all across the country designed to help those who truly are looking for help and support to stop drinking. There are also rehab programs readily available if one is willing to go there for help.

The best way to stop drinking? Don’t start.

“Being drunk is a good disguise. I drink so I can talk to assholes. This includes me.”

~ Jim Morrison

It’s funny some drunk people talk to themselves.

I drink to shut miselves ups.

The key is to measure from high thrifty shelves

And to rarely succumb to hiccups.

They clinked their glasses. Ready to take mouthfuls of the drink from the gods.

The bartender wiped one of the glasses quickly and placed it back on the counter. ‘‘What’ll it be, M’lady?’’

She stared at the glass and then grabbed the bottle to her right, raising it in the air, ‘‘Drinks on me, for every being present here! Tonight, we drink and feast like there’s no tomorrow.’’

The crowd in the pub all cheered and some started singing praises to the young lady.

She bowed her head and smiled. Then slowly looked at a stranger walking to past her. They sat in the corner watching her drink to her hearts content.

When several of the crowd started leaving, she scanned the pub to see if the stranger was still watching her. She got up from her seat and waltzed to the side of the front door.

The stranger was not going to let her escape this time. She failed to walk in a straight path. Almost falling onto the slippery icy ground.

She heard footsteps coming nearer to her side. ‘‘Who are you?’’

She gasped seeing the stranger take a blade and raise it at her. The cloaked figure plunged the blade into her chest. ‘‘Your time giving the humans alcohol is over.’’

As soon as she removed the blade from her chest, she transformed from her human form into a being with a crown made out of a grapevine sticking around the forehead. The stranger removed her cloak shook her head & said, ‘‘I should have warned you— drinking all that alcohol is bad- even for you~ Bacchus.’’

She moved her hood back over her head & said to herself, ’’Knowing these humans, they’ll find another way of having and even producing more alcohol even with the god of wine now taken care of. Why do they do this to themselves? Do they not see how it affects them, on all levels?

‘‘Eh, Bacchus knew exactly what he was doing when he introduced them to their own doom. They can make their choice to either stay away from it, or let it kill them from the inside.’’

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8Orng8Edqy8

#AllUpToYou. © 07/11\2020 Samedi.

His days always started in the quiet dark of early morning. His internal clock awakened him before the sun rose each morning, even if oblivion had not found him until an hour before.

He hefted himself off the bed, oppressed by the weight of his body as much as his mind. He headed to the bathroom to relieve the first. The second lightened when he reached the kitchen and grabbed the ever present bottle from the side shelf in the fridge. With the house still with slumber, no one awake to look pained and cause him guilt or shame, he tipped his head, drinking straight from the bottle. With the slow burn of each swallow, the tightness in his chest loosened, albeit infinitesimally. Enough so that he could take a deep, cleansing breath. Savoring the relief, the release, however fleeting, he opened his eyes. The ever-present darkness receded to the periphery.

Another day.

Placing the bottle back in the fridge, he headed back to the bedroom to prepare for the office.

The name Hiram means benevolent brother and high-born, and according to the Old Testament was a name given to the king of Tyre who helped build the palace for David in Jerusalem, and it was given as the Christian name to Hank Williams, Sr. in September of 1923.

The son of Hank Williams, when he was coming up, would visit the father of Hank Williams and shoot up the battery of his tractor with a 22 shotgun only “to get his ass worn out” afterwards.

Hank Sr. died from heart failure when his son was three years and left behind a complicated legacy, shrined in golden horror, like a ghost painted underneath the sun’s halo. Among his lines considered to be popular Southern poetry are, “Hear that lonesome whippoorwill/He sounds too blue to fly/That midnight train is whining low/I’m so lonesome I could cry.” In the same song he writes and sings, “I’ve never seen a night so long/When time goes crawling by/The moon just went behind the clouds/To hide its face and cry,” and, “Did you ever see a robin weep/When the leaves begin to die/That means he’s lost his will to live,” and finally, “The silence of a falling star/Lights up a purple sky/And as I wonder where you are/I’m so lonesome I could cry.”

Photographs of him depict him in a great shining suit, matching a godly and heavenly bright smile, hands on his guitar as it were his tools and he a carpenter, mouth drawn over the microphone as though it were an instrument to speak directly to God.

He learned to play the guitar at age nine from a local bluesman who had migrated from New Orleans to the town where Hank would grow up in Georgiana, Alabama, and he learned to sing in the church, where else. He related to both the redemption and hope of gospel music and the lonesomeness and down-hearted honesty of the blues. Most of all, he refused failure and wore a cowboy hat while on stage and the year after World War II ended, he was in Nashville and becoming a star and spearheading country music as a legitimate form of American art. He wrote and recorded profound lyrics that touch the heart and when he sang the words, they touch even deeper, down to the soul, and wrote over thirty songs in his lifetime that were among the top ten singles on Country charts.

This gift he had did not come for free. He suffered intellectually and emotionally, likely a myriad of different mental illnesses, just being of the earth in itself raised the questions for him of the beyond and the infinite, total darkness, and so he suffered in his genius, and was born with a defect in his back called spina bifida which causes severe and chronic pain along the thirty-three vertebrae forming the spine, as though he inherited the agony of the entire world and was made to carry it upon the plates of his back, and he self-medicated heavily with whiskey and prescription drugs and it finally killed him at 29 years old, the same age as Jesus just one year before the apostles began to write about his life.

One of his first jobs was playing for a radio broadcast in which he was fired for constant drunkenness, to the point where he could not even function and he’d drink this way until he died. He was a poet and brilliant, and probably incredibly sick. He had a talent that was beyond earth and if you listen to him still, when a song hits you how it’s intended, you’ll look up and breathe again and blink and realize that stained upon your own cheeks are tears.

It is likely he did not want to drink out of choice, but from a desperate effort for escape. Hank Sr., I reckon, only ever wanted freedom from torture and pain and misery that made up his bloodline just as much as his poetic and weeping heart. One can look at the photographs of him nailed up on the walls of Meat & Three’s and houses across the Bible Belt next to portraits of Jesus and hanging up too in the halls of The Grand Ole Opry—that angelic smile guising all the demons underneath—and wonder if he ever was released from earth, if he finally saw that great light of the universe before passing on, or if his soul still haunts the dust of the material world wandering forever on down a lost highway.

booze, booze.. yes, for my age, i know too much of the waking up on linoleum and vomiting up cold pizza on an even colder night off your buddy’s balcony. i know of the subtle dusting on cheeks after one glass of wine suddenly becomes two, and three, and you don’t remember where you put your drink but you know you had it somewhere before you went to find becca. i know of music swimming through the ears and singing solemn tunes to yourself while you lean over a measuring bowl because trish didn’t have a bucket. i know of all sense of awareness going and losing yourself to the freezing floor and not feeling a thing, getting up and asking if you really just fell, or if it was in your head. i know of the stomach turning at the smell of liquor the next morning and your hair wreaking of vodka and redd’s and whatever the fuck else you ingested that you lost track of while you buy cheese puffs at the store nearby. i know of kneeling above your own friends who lay unconscious, lost to cough syrups and the last shot of the fireball that you know she shouldn’t have had. i know of coffee doing flips inside and the groaning and the crying and the screaming and the incompetence. i know of the way it screws you up because you drank and forgot to take your meds and now you’re fucked in the head for the next two weeks until your meds balance out again. i know of it all and i hope to never know of it again- as a sixteen year old girl who has laid her hands on the bathroom floor and promised and swore like an elderly man with a problem, that she will never drink again, even if the girls are down. and, like an elderly man with a problem, there’s a party next saturday if you’re in to do it all over again.