Drying Out

Dry Drunk as a metaphor. Clinging to the sources of our needs, living familiar only to wanting. Possessing anything becomes alien. Possession is left nine tenths of the laws that apply to those other folks-- them remaining of society. What really can't be unfortunate.

Dry Drunk as a metaphor. It wasn't until recent that I really cornered the concept. Archie Bunkers, men afraid of tomorrow. Living and dying, afraid of tomorrow. Old dead Uncle Wallace will tell you straight, all the things we leave behind are covered with the claw marks of our trying to keep hold.

Dry Drunk, that's an idea. We can change the behavior by will alone, but leave the source flowing same as it ever was. The source the same. Need is a pistol, sure thing. Same as it ever was, cold rifle grease lipstick kisses dotting the nape to the neck. A need to speak, needs to be heard, needs to possess.

It's fear. That dry drunk. That cyclical behavior and repeat to history. Those familiar glass cups, a familiar fight. I stood at Kelly's square the other night, trying to talk down one set of fists. But too bad, there are others. His nose was broken against the car window and the blood flattened out like a clown around his lips. Ollie was an ass and did something to deserve it. But we all watched from the corner in the rain, as he screamed and swore through his broken nose. Like a gargle. He knelt down in the middle of the street and washed off the blood from a puddle against the curb. That was beautiful to see, like Jesus doing feet. Tiffany said he deserved to die, with the conviction of a Pentecostal snake whisperer. I'm not sure if that were true or if she was autistic. She was autistic.
Who can be sure, Ollie was mostly guilty of smuggling gin in his pockets.

The Romans said, half our problems are sourced in mistaking one cause for things built of many.
 Maybe we aren't nearly so good as the take we operate from. Maybe that's fine. Cutting faces into the hill clay with safety razors-- a night is a thing like that. It's neither a straight line, nor is it a cycle. Maybe just a single cut that tends to stumble. But either way, there is one time to it and it's easy to knead out the same possessions rather than stake down those fears of tomorrow.

Dry Drunk, Alright.

Bail

Drying out tonight. Getting harder and messier picking up the puddle pieces days after a wet spree, goddamn it.

It has been raining for days, all week rather. Looking out the window seems the days were stuck on repeat-- same ol' mess of wet and yellows.

I went down to the Hotel for singing night-- I bumped into a guy named Ryan in the street.
He has the waist length Metal hair and a waist long Metal beard-- Ryan was supposed to be in Portland, Oregon with his band but his grandmother had died two hours before. We had talked about his grandmother when she was dying, before his tour-- her first husband was killed by fascists in Italy when she was 17. She immigrated alone as soon as the war ended.

There was some sort of autism to the air that night-- a girl was very upset a certain friend wasn't with me, she told me about liking Bob's Burgers and her fetish for feeding skinny looking men, how she had shredded threadbare pajama pants off in a fit of passion the night before, how shitting makes her feel empowered and how people frequently tell her she looks like Alanis Morissette. I honestly didn't see a resemblance.

A dealer with a bowl-cut admired my jacket. It was actually a work shirt from back on the farm, and the mistake confused me. Double so when he kept returning to comment again, nervous that he may have only imagined our earlier exchanges.

An old man named Kenny admired my shoulders and wanted to touch them. He touched them. He had the easy-comfortable bearing of a pedophile, the articulate and delicate aura of a man who'd burned live animals trapped in gas soaked sacs. He wanted us to be friends, and wanted me to know that I should always say hello if I saw him and that I should never avoid his company if we met in public. He wanted to hear me sing, and then touch my shoulders again.

I have taken to singing a sort of repeating repertoire of re-interpretations of good old favorites: Faster Than a Ray of Light by Madonna, Walking on Broken Glass by Annie Lennox, Proud Mary by Tina Turner and Bad Blood by Neil Sedaka. I tend to sing like Tom Jones having a Bruce Springsteen sort of aneurism-- tinged to a Morrissey-nian sense of shame.

 I frequently worry that my reputation as a heterosexual man about town has become a penny stock.

I drank and sung.

Millie has deep mental handicaps, she is a middle aged woman who walks around the bars and sells gimp bracelets. She gets impatient when her marks take too long with their change, but will smile and say "Yeah that's me" if you give her a cigarette. The sort of person who quickly embarrasses her altruistic defenders with fits of aimless violence. Millie and I danced to some song I cannot remember-- we spun each other in circles. Kenny said oh! a regular Clark Kent! American as apple pie!

I left out some back door, and then woke up this morning.