Wine (Part XII)

There are couches which are good to collapse on and then there are couches with hidden sharp things in their depths. I say this because it often becomes necessary to avail oneself of a collapsing-couch, like fainting-cushions in days of yore. Especially when nights are chaotic and it gets to the point where the script and schema becomes hopelessly punctate. My interlocutor tells me a joke; do I respond? Have I heard this joke before? Is it funny? Does (s)he expect a response? It is only in times of great cognitive deptivation that questions like this get asked. And the only response that ever gets emitted is poor little A.D. collapsing on someone's shoulder. The modern fainting-cushion.

They say St. Patrick chased the snakes out of Ireland. There are no stars tonight. Traffic lights are little fractals, and I see through the slats of the fire escape the eavestroughs of the roof. Inside our window a rigged-up mini disco ball rotates. Shadows dance. Ghetto strobe lights kick in (they work best if you flick the light switch on and off proportional to the pounding dance beat). My dancing-alone-in-my-room secret is spilling out into the living room as a holy molten wave of sweaty enlightenment into the crucibles of live and writing human bodies. They do backflips; they do pull-ups on on of the metal bars holding up the (non-functional) fire escape; there are sounds dancing up the walls into the cobwebs and wormholes in the ceiling. Above us: the housemates are watching an incredibly sad scene where a child is dying. And they say St. Patrick chased the snakes out of Ireland. So says our blues-wailing beardo. And we hand him wine long ago transmuted to vinegar by the luck of the Irish. We'll drink some beers. Some aetherial things to keep us going, at least for a little while. The living room looks like a gay bar.

They say St. Patrick chased the snakes out of Ireland. That's what the traffic lights told me with their rhythmic patterns. Definitely seeing some visual effects. So says the family of raccoons in our alley. Mating calls reverberate. I do the joyless twist from Pulp Fiction. I exeunt and end the night reading. I don't usually read when I'm drunk. I shouldn't try to accomplish things in such a state.

Consider: "Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before,” Bokonon tells us. “He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”