Wine (Part V)

As you might have noticed, there has been a distinctive trend this week toward hitting the sauce pretty hard. Not just wine either, but I prefer it as useful shorthand. If every week were like this week, I would be a dying man, but I would also be a man very much into opportunity, curious observations, mental snapshots, social cognition and so on. But the general case is kind of useless and doesn't grab the imagination at all.

So, what happened? Well, if this were my first week of drinking, I'd have glamorzed it beyond belief. Nights languidly mixing wine and vodka and smoking um peace pipe with houses full of people. Inviations to exclusive buffets; realizing the postmodern condition, frazzling straight society with borderline-legal equipment. Officially pronouncing that my drug habits make absolutely no sense. Discussing my indecisions with people just met. Mangling the abrasively topical. Failing to express wonder at the curve of the streets, at the chimneys and curlicues and baustrades. Realizing that hermaphrodites can be an excellent conversational lever. Realizing further that what I thought I had complicated was a simple case after all. What does that mean? It made sense when numbed hands spit it out onto the internets. I'm tired; I want to sleep. So, what shall it be? A bottle of wine or a bottle of pills?

Consider: "A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships."