The Jack Off

He's drinking double jack and cokes. Everyone is nicely drunk. Not rude or obnoxious, just having a good time. He opens up his briefcase and shows everyone all the different pills he takes, viagra, heart medication, etc. His buddy walks outside and he's alone with his two female friends. "You know what prison taught me? How to jack off. Jacking off saved my life." The women start laughing. "I jack off all the time now. I don't need you girls. I take viagra just so I can jack it a few times. It's less of a hassle. I don't buy my fist drinks, just lotion!" The women are laughing. The friend walks back in. "You telling these girls how you like to jack off?" He said as he sat back down. "Yeah, it keeps me centered."

A little wine drunk.

Decided to get into a wine drunk and read Fante and Schopenhauer...chances are, I'll have to re-read it all again tomorrow. It all makes sense right now. Tomorrow I'll wonder what I did with the time. I have a grey area from about age 23 to 37. 14 years of fucking watching a television with no aerial. Yeah, tonight it's a wine drunk, it's been a long time since I've had one. Lay back and watch politicians fuck us all. Fuck it. Wine drunk...I. Just. Don't. Fucking. Care.
But here's a little story anyway/how.
She comes to the bar and orders two gin and tonics, one for her and one for her. She's going to see Kenny Wayne Sheppard later...strike one...but she's hot and drinks...she keeps ordering drinks and takes them to the rooftop. Later, she emerges with her boyfriend who is stoned. She claims that she can outdrink any man and not the most beautiful girl in the world but with a loser boyfriend who wants to go to a restaurant while she keeps saying "I don't need to eat I just need another drink..." perfection! Of course, you can't have two drunks together for too long...there's no balance, just drinking and sinking. Every time a girl orders a vodka and water, I get weak in the knees. Holy shit, my true drink of choice, well, I don't even need the water. But vodka waters mean either drinking suicide, fuck something up or straight up fucking, or all three in some hot order.
Fuck this wine, trolling for vodka.

Armies of Mes and Hims

Chicago. This goddamned city. I have lived here far too long. I walk past people I knew or fucked all the time. People that I am not facebook friends with...One day I fear that I will run into myself. Maybe on the bus or train that I take hundreds of times a year. There will be some rift in time and I'll run into myself. I'll have forgotten to look in a mirror for a month and not realize that I have put on another ten pounds. That my eyes are sunken and circles beneath them are blacker. My hair is longer and my face unshaven. I'll look at that prick, who is going to work and living a life, some life that he doesn't want to live but secretly does, and I'll say "I won't die today, if a schmuck like that is alive then surely I'll be okay for at least another day." And then I'll walk to work, behind the asshole and he'll cross the street and I'll get the red. I'll randomly turn to my left and see my reflection in a window and whisper "what the fuck." And then I'll walk into traffic and die. The other me will punch in and continue his thoughts, the ones he had on the bus where he thought he saw himself but just assumed that he was hungover and delusional. "What am I fucking doing?" he'll say to himself as he stocks beer and puts fresh bottles of whiskey and vodka on the shelf. He'll look outside and see an ambulance carrying me, a guy who looks like him on a stretcher. He'll visit me in the hospital and eat me, to avoid getting hospital bills...the logic of this fucking guy! He'll go back to my life, his life. Drink and smoke and shit and wonder...and wait. But now he has a new feeling: paranoia. Because there may be another rift and another him. Or worse, an army of hims...and an army of mes.

Body In Revolt

As I put the glass of wine down in front of the cocksucking business shit man, it hits...it's like I missed a breath and all of a sudden all of the energy is sucked out of me. My eyes feel like they shoot to the back of my head and everything is surreal. I make it back behind the bar but I felt like I was walking through darkness, in full light. A few regulars are hanging out. One of them asks me, "you alright?" He saw the mood swing or my demeanor shift. We were just joking about Iran a minute ago and now I can barely talk. "I don't know, I feel weird, a little short of breath suddenly," I say like I just ran a marathon. "Like a panic attack" he said. "Yeah, I think I'm having a panic attack...or a stroke." "I've been dealing with that for 50 years now. I can't figure it out. I've been living in misery but I'm trying yoga." This guy used to be an alcoholic. When he quit, the panic set in. Maybe that's how this story is going. But I don't want to be an asshole. I try to clean up. The more sober I am, the more I can feel those strange pains you feel when you get older. Twenty years of fucking drinking. I stop for three days and exercise and take vitamins and I feel like I'm having a fucking heart attack. Maybe I never noticed all the shit that was going on inside because I was always drunk or hungover. Maybe I just didn't give a shit. The moment you realize you want to live, something reminds you how close to death you always are. I can tell my blood, my heart, my lungs, don't give out on me today, today I will clean up, exercise, eat right...but your organs don't fucking care about you anymore. Now they are the punks. "We want the whiskey!" they scream. You find a reason to live, you walk outside and find a thousand reasons to die. Then you lay down and feel like your innards are participating in a fucking war. Riots. Fires. Grab the bottle. Grab the pills, make that pain stop. But you don't want to die. You just don't want the pain or the thirst. But the two are connected. You don't want to be miserable, but you're alive, so there is no choice.
Alright, enough of that shit.

Random memory.

I'm walking this dog, a poodle. Not mine, not my friends...a friend of a friends dog. I'm walking around with a bag full of shit and this curly-fur dog. This dog will get laid before me. He knows it, too. fucking dog. My father wants to have lunch, he doesn't care anymore, I can suck cock in prison and he'd be okay...after yelling at me for so many years to make something of myself. I'm nothing and nowhere, happy, father? "But I don't care anymore" he says from somewhere. "shut the door behind you, don't turn back when I yell, "then why the fuck did you...oh nevermind...."

Safe Explosions

I'm walking down aisles of cosmetics...looking for q-tips....why the fuck is this happening to me. I pick up a gallon of bleach and assume that I can drink it all in a gulp. I find the liquor aisle...she says "put it back"...I do and I die...I'm getting very little out of this shopping experience. If it ain't booze or something that will wipe up my blood and vomit...and I don't have a coupon, then forget it. Forget you...I did my duty, loving you...I'm stealing condoms, not so I can use them to fuck, but to stuff with hand-grenades...nope, no point at all...I'm just having another one of those "attacks"...
Someone finds me on the floor, I've got six packs of six packs of socks under my head. She pokes me and says "I like what you have to say..." she smiles, I continue to lay on the ground, re-focusing. I'd be happy if I woke up in "women's lingerie" but I didn't. I passed in a handicapped parking space in the parking lot. The shopping list clutched in my hand says "DIE". "We had a coupon for that..."

Writers

It's a weird feeling when a kid sits at my bar and breaks out a manuscript he is working on. Standing on the opposite side...listening to his ideology and dreams, invoking that "passion". I stop short of saying "I'm a writer, I wrote some shit." I just let him talk. "It's a book for everyone" he says, "It's complicated, emotional, political, philosophical...intrigue..." 'My books were about trying to survive the path from bed to toilet to the job and back, I thought, smoking cigarettes and praying for the sun to go away. I wrote books for nobody, about myself, nobody. Romantic nobody. Another destitute person, maybe trying to survive but more about the process of self destruction. Loneliness. I am genre-less.'So I just said, "Eh, we should talk...not now but sometime, I wrote some shit; Emotional, political, philosophical, no real intrigue though..." His eyes lit up. "I'd love to hear about it, maybe you could help me," he said. I cashed him out and turned out the lights. It won't be long before you realize that you can write, be read, be reviewed and be ignored or be lost among everyone else that writes. Lost in a queue, or on a shelf.
At an early stage, when I told people that I was a writer, they told me the same thing, "live that dream" but dreams don't come with health benefits and this world is poison, and you can't afford poison control.
I turned a life of documenting drinking into just drinking and drinking.
I've sat at many a bar with a manuscript and just gotten wasted. I sat with a dream that swirls away with every shot and every bad song played on the juke.
I pull the manuscript out. I read it.. I put it away. Like so many others.
This time, I light it all on fire.

That Christian, Christmas spirit

I was pouring him Southern Comfort old fashions and he was asking about the homeless guy across the street on the corner of the alley. "He's there all the time," I said. "Where else would he be?" the man said and then made some weird sourpuss face and said "maybe looking for a job?" Oh shit, it's on. "Well, I don't think he can look for a job, I know that he's a bit crazy." "Well, I don't mind telling you, I'm Christian and I'm just sick of paying for people like that to stay alive." "Well, if it helps any," I said, knowing where this conversation was going, "he's mentally disabled, a Vietnam veteran, released from a hospital that Reagan shut down in the 80s." "Well that just makes it harder to hate him, being a Christian," the man said and took a sip of his old fashion. "But you can still find a way..." I said. The man took another sip..."Oh there's always a way to hate..." I could tell that the old man was getting loopy from the drink and he was a dick anyway. "It just pisses me off that he's not trying to find a job!" He said. "I think he paid his dues...it's called killing people and watching people blow up around you and running for your life in the fucking dark for years...it would drive anyone crazy...what do you do?" I asked. "I'm retired," he said, he sensed the confrontation. "From WHAT?" I asked. "I ran a golf course." You fucking dick, go back to Kansas.

Warm Flesh

It's fucking cold tonight. If you don't have someone's warm flesh to hold onto, light something on fire and dream about new skin.

Green Creme De Cock

These people force me to drink...with lips and teeth covered in green creme de menthe, she got onto her 55 year old knees and started sucking his 25 year old cock. A grandmother, she clutched his ass and gagged, a wife, she took in a breath smiled and continued. He passed out when she started laughing. I saw him weeks later and bluntly asked "do you remember that old lady sucking your cock outside of the office?" He stared at me blankly for a moment then something clicked but he didn't flinch, "that sounds like me," he said and then said "Well I just stopped by to say hello." He walked away as the memory started flushing in. He took a few steps then stopped and turned around. "I was wondering why my dick was green when I woke up." Then he walked away.

California Girl Incinerator

These are the best fucking nights...when the snow is coming down, the booze is flowing and I  remember all my girls that California ate. You can never have a night like this unless you live in Chicago. Leaving work, walking through a desolate city, looking for a taxi. Sometimes I wouldn't mind looking for a taxi with one of those girls. But whatever this is, is better.

There's nothing but shit out there tonight. I go to the grocery store after work to buy whiskey and bologna and there's a homeless guy that stinks of vinegar bent over, like 90 degrees, over a case of packaged fish. He's smelling it all. But how can he smell anything past his stench? Then this woman in black, wearing black sunglasses and dragging a suitcase with a broken wheel keeps yelling "fucking married people!" I thought that maybe I was just hearing part of a conversation and she was talking on her bluetooth. She stops in the middle of the aisle that has pudding in it and pushes her hair behind her ears. No bluetooth. She does some yoga pose and says "why can't they just fuck off". I grab a can of turkey chili and move on. The vinegar guy is now hovering over the hot dogs. He picks up one package and shakes his head in disgust. He puts down that pack of hot dogs and picks up another. He looks at it and then shakes his head in disgust. He does this the entire time that I realize that all I want is alcohol, so I put the turkey chili back and grab a bottle of whiskey. I walk over the self-checkout. The weird woman is standing over a self-checkout register waving her hand over it, back and forth, back and forth, still talking to no one, but this time saying that "Merlin was a dope". I buy my whiskey and before I leave the store, I look over at the lottery scratch off machine. "Maybe all this weirdness is telling you to buy a lottery ticket", I think. Then I think, everyday is fucking weirdness and I never win. There's a man standing behind a display of dying Christmas-themed plants and flowers staring at me.