Wine (Part XIX)

Pictures to remember the night by would be nice, but I forgot to turn on the flash, so I'm left with a lot of black-on-brown photos of going down alleys. Plot points which will be lost to eternity. Anti-aliasing effects in my retina making the sidewalk stripy, loopy, moving when it shouldn't be. Grabbing my forehead in exasparation. Lying on a soft armchair? Someone declares me a 3 on the Kinsey scale. My ears hurt and ring from minus 17 degrees celsius wind constantly fluxing. Icy patches I will surely slip on: I descend the staircase showing off the glittering jewels of the Downtown, a brief flash of memory of marvelling at the magnificence of all we have created. This is a busness town, so no cabbie will pick up my drifter form. I want to sleep; I don't want to sleep. Not like this. It feels like the next few days will involve penance for this. Penance for crimes committed in my mind. Penance at perchance violating the societal codes of conduct, the patronage that exists from the powerful and flows in its non-benevolent bounty to the vassals. My landlord, my boss, my progenitor, my supervisor, my teacher, my paterfamilias, my guru. One day they will sing to the memory of those I've met, those who left shitty situations for this place were they could cry on couches, cradled by the vestiges of civilization. Gandhi was once asked what he thought of wstern civilization, and he said "that would be nice". Because for this brief moment our heads are cowned in flame. Thye glow as beacons to the rest of the world, before we collapse with lungs filled with phlegm and other things. It's funny: once realizing this we stopped rolling down the street into the river.

Consider: "To know that there is nothing to know, and to grieve that it is so difficult to communicate this "nothing to know" to others - this is the life of Zen, this is the deepest thing in the world."