Justification

I drink so much
to drown the taste of myself
and to blur my vision of you.

21 July 1989

I don’t drink. I can take a drink—I’m not a sober alcoholic or anything—but I so rarely do that it’s easier to round things down. Alcohol’s a depressant anyway and the last thing a card-carrying depressive like myself needs is encouragement. In 1989 I would still take an odd drink but I never drank to excess and so this is entirely fictional; I’m using drink as a metaphor. I find myself dwelling on the words “vision of you” though. I’ve used “taste” in the previous line so the obvious meaning of “vision” is sight but that’s not all the word means. What did I see when I looked at F.? Or B.? Or myself in the mirror? Something real? People say that to each other—“What we have is real”—and yet most of the time reality sucks. I may not drink or take drugs to escape from reality but that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on the imaginary. Far from it.

2 comments:

Kass said...: I have a friend who says he drinks to get his brain level down to the level of his neighbors (he lives in rural Oregon).; 9 August 2016 at 18:14
Jim Murdoch said...: For years, Kass, I watched people on TV throw back drink after drink and they never seemed to get impaired in any way, in fact alcohol revived them. You can imagine my surprise and disappointment when I actually tried the stuff and it did nothing of the sort. To be fair I have a very low tolerance for any form of narcotics. I could get drunk off a packet of wine gums.; 10 August 2016 at 16:40

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