Ichizen's are selling half price cocktails tonight and I fancy
getting blotto on a medley of strawberry crush champagne, exotic
Russian vodkas and that special kind of fiery passion that makes me
feel like Duke Nukem jumping through a ruined city, burnt and amazed.
The waitress brings us red stuff in shot glasses, shooting blue flame
like miniature volcanoes. Simultaneously we starve the flames with
aching hands and sink the liquid warmth.
I can't cope with other people in the world. My friends are looking at me with alien eyes and conjuring magic phrases which I do not understand. They come over to me and shake me by my shoulders saying over and over again, "Wake up Jude,
wake up." But the nightmare of this life is one from which I cannot awake. I told them to go away but they wouldn't abandon me. I told them to leave me alone to die but they stayed. They came looking for me but I closed the door. "Itchizen's are selling half price cocktails tonight" they plead and I get my jacket and head for the neon.
What do I have to do before people will believe me when I say that I
don't care anymore? If I am frightened that nothing is real then I am frightened of nothing . (I'll have a Long Island iced tea next and easy on the crushed mint). So I'm sitting against the wall with my elbows in crushed peanut shells sipping the liquid fantasy and looking through the glass display case at peackock feathers and grey velvet bows, thinking about these friends surrounding, thinking about they way my life should have turned.
Dominic asks me if I would like a drink. I ask for a 'Slow Comfortable Screw". And the barman picks up the bottles and pours in a choreographed sequence of Kung Fu moves. The Sloe gin is slow. The Southern Comfort slips down in comfort. And yes, I am screwed
It seems as though everybody who enters and exits my view of the world has some understanding of some peculiar thing that I cannot grasp. And in turn, of my experience, they see nothing. You cannot share it because there is nothing in the waking life I can point to and say, "Look! Look! That's what it is like."
I am not sure I can ever be happy. I don't even know what happiness is. I wander embittered round the earth, ravaged by time and space and half price cocktails at Ichizen's.
(revised February 2006)
