Comfort And Power In The Modern World

I look back with an almost nostalgic feeling over the past. All the drink, the smoking, the poverty, but most of all, the pain. It felt so painful. As a 19-year-old life is limitless in its infinite boredom, and the only way to deal with that is to feel special, even in the way I chose to. I felt special in my pain. I felt it all so deeply, so sharply. And you get to the curious stage of not distinguishing between being drunk and being alive, so that the very thought of soberness feels like death. There is no drug like alcohol; from a heightened sense of worth to that snot-strewn pillowcase and it all feels worthwhile, just keep drinking.

We should write every day. Human beings should make it their duty to keep a diary, to take stock of their life, their direction. We think about ourselves a lot, but from inside. We need to step out of that self-justifying world we keep in our heads and become critical of what we are doing, what we have done.

University. I'm ashamed I spent two years of my life... what is the word? Wasted doesn't quite cover it. Two years of pretending to everyone that I was a student, but I hadn't written a word. I hadn't attended anything. Two years. Living with students who were studying, who thought I was studying. The deceit involved in such a task is huge. But there was no game plan, no grand design to live life in idyllic, lazy luxury. I wanted that degree, but I didn't think I could do it. So I didn't think about it. That was easy, there's always something important to think about Mmmm and drink is so good at making you focus on the important stuff, like love. Love, not life.

Words have a way of burrowing themselves into your brain. This paragraph of Topol's always burnt my mind:

"Whenever I feel time losing its power, whenever it stops sucking me in and the swirl of chaos and noise in the tunnel falls still, the Fiery always helps. And the next day that rigor mortis is proof that time is dead for me again. Like the way the Chippewas gripped their paddles after they drank the Fiery, seated stiffly in their canoes, heads shattered from inside. They needed it too: rifles and steel knives and smallpox were what smashed time for them. They maybe wanted a circle; I longed for a straight line."

The Fiery, the Fiery ¦.. Have you ever heard a better name for it? The burn, the retch, the stinging eyes, the stab of regret, the ripped-out time.