Wine (Part IV)

Why do I gnash my forehead against solid stone minarets night after night? You might as well ask why I write these posts. It is a good question, but I'm in no mood to talk about it, and you are a captive, to some extent, of my sentences. But you can leave whenever you want, just as quickly as all sense left, just as quickly as the neon sign outside the hyperrealistic Bloor St. window managed to redden and cast its long shadows across out lost semi-kitten. It was in a musician pad. They wove the fabric of the religion of our generation, because art is the only God you can prove exists. Anyway, last night was another of those nights where if there were a camera I would turn to it at the worst possible time and deliver some deadpan monologue. (Such as "the man over my right shoulder rocks there and cultivates the bitter lines of disapproval, but he is the unacknowledged Bodhisattva of this scrappy collective; he may shave his head; he may wear the uniform of the agnostic metrosexual: but if intent were butter he would sell the surplus".) More scenes and staged suicidal dramas; more family prognoses and neediness. More scenes of mean drunkenness than I care to see in the next decade. Who complains to his fellow buyers about exorbitant pricing? Sucker traps with purple neon and big-screen TVs. This night the stars were nowhere to be found. A friend's mattress: hidden stains of blood and coffee and water. The typical toilet scene at 3 a.m.: vomit and excrement--but why the blood? I have a stomach of steel but I, too, was bleeding. Glass shards? Table edge? I had managed to shave off a dime-sized patch of skin, like a fucking section in an anatomy teaching lab, exposing a slightly deeper layer of skin. When I start sutaining inexplicable injuries, bleeding and not feeling it, I know it's time to wrap the night up.

Consider: "Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins."