Why We Drink -

There's a fundamental reason. We desperately yearn for a sense of self as part of a larger social fabric.  Whatever that means.  Even alone.  Especially alone.

Because we maintain a relationship with drink past the borderline of intimate, and that skews all other relations to things, people, places, and events.  And skewed understanding of self-other references are about as problematic a thing as one might muster on a steamy night in a Russian bath with a good whacking of bamboo and a brutal splinter beveled into the left cheek of one's ass.

I tell you this from the cocoon of reclusivity.

I tell you this because I cannot tell anyone else.  Because I'm also losing my sense of distance.  Because a sense of distance is all I have anymore, a palpable tension of humidity that conducts stuff, I know not what, through the current of our mingling and maligning, and there is nothing healthy that is not toxic, so forget about the dualistic tendencies of obsessives and try to engage with your true self for a little while. He or she has been trying to show him or herself for a few years now, all the while smothered by your need to fit in.

He or she has been muffled by your teflon exterior, fried deep in fat.

I used to have a poem.  I used to have poetry.  In my journal.  Locked up for my own recognizance. Before I knew the plastic lining of costumes, the musty smell of body odor that's lingered one season too long.  Before I knew the heartbreak of aging, the desperateness of decaying ideals, I was already building new triumphs to hope toward, denying the outline of hope-lost, figuring that I'd fix that with the next fix, and on it went.

The most brutal fact of excitement is loneliness embodied.  The second less brutal fact of growing up is fornicating on the biblical notions of fidelity and righteous fulfillment, graduating to flossing daily and getting your exercise in before your body turns to mush right under once watchful eyes.  Now lazy, desolate, repining forthwith into the ether of ongoing effort and strained gaze.

It only matters if you make it matter.