For the Fire and the Glory

Drunkery and the Sweet Blessed Rage. There was a time where I had not a concern in my life save for glorious attempts at self-destruction. It was a prolonged suicide and it was all you could have hoped for. Indeed, 'twas a consummation devoutly to be wished. And yet.

All things must end. It is the unfortunate consequence of a linearly limited mind. Beginning, middle, end. What else is there? Few have known otherwise. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. I decided not to.

Fuck it. The rallying cry of a generation. To decadence. A dedication I can be proud of. But it meant so much more than they thought. They thought it clever, a toast to literary heroes who went down in a blaze of drunken glory, injecting philpon into their dessicated veins in the search for one last fix, one last book, one last shot at a life they never wanted. But it was so much more than that. They saw flashes of it. Snapshots of glory; of destruction. But they never thought. No one ever does.

The money's gone. Our brains are shot. But the liquor we've still got.

Campai, mother fucker. Because in the end, what else is there? Fuck it.

I have nothing better to do. I suppose I could be drinking now. But altered states are so boring when you are alone. The laughter echoes louder, harsher, more desperate. Because there really is nothing more. Fuck it.


I have read so many things. I have heard so many more. Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies. Unless you kill it. Hope has no place in the desert. Not real hope. We sell dreams and fantasies. Because the desert strips you bare. And there is nothing else there. And the laughter still echoes.

I lost myself a long time ago. I was nine. And everything stopped. Liars aren't born. We are made. I was nine. And everything changed.

Reality is fluid, if you let it.

***
"The second teaching from the golden eternity
is that never was a first teaching
from the golden eternity. So be sure."
-Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity