Intox & Ideals

        He walked through the door without knocking with a case of beer in one hand and a loose grip on the impossible in the other. Immediately confronted with familiar faces and friends he can feel the muscles in his body starting to flow like molten glass. Spitting greetings, absurdities, profanities, and absurdly profane greetings he demands attention, but receives it only out of love. This place is a temple of love and hate. This place is the very residence of Dionysus himself. Gulping the beer and drinking the conversation he floats through rooms and peoples consciousness. No one is afraid to appear foolish or brash. The only fear is to appear restrained, uninformed, or, well, afraid.

        When a man of some intelligence spoke at the right time it was met with a squall of reaffirmations and rebuttals. Who could have thought that alcohol and altruism could live so closely? Who would have guessed that these hooligans, ruffians, perverts and slackers could discuss philosophy in its most relentlessly honest prose? Debate and debauchery, sensitivity and sin, adolescence and acceptance, crime and compassion, these things not only fit but flow together. The beer becomes water and the dialog becomes a river. His mouth is parched and his thirst is great. Events blur together and some are cut out entirely as his world becomes an obscure circus of colors and emotion. The night claims his eyes and his mind as he falls into black.

        He wakes up to a sun much more intruding than what he remembers. A world that is much grittier that he had previously known. With a head splitting and stomach twisting he walks out the door with the smell of smoke in one hand and a firm grasp of reality in the other.