So how is the weather? (a few notes from where I am)

It’s been getting colder around these parts. Chilling, in fact.

And I’ve been drinking.

A lot.

Every day, Ruthie talks less, comforts less, breathes less. She’s retreating into herself. The lotus blossoms that so recently grew in her footsteps have been replaced by brambles. And my melancholy has reduced me, like a homeless signifier, to talking to myself in empty metaphors and similes.

This could be what has pushed me to start heavily drinking. Or, it may be the result of the alcohol. I'm not really sure at this point. I put 25 years of whisky down my gullet yesterday. That makes 120 years in the last week. I can vaguely remember reading Samuel Johnson with Wilbur last week, but now our company is Bukowski. Like the poet Alvaro de Campos and his opium, I’ve fallen into shit poetry “as into a ditch.” And worse, the shit poetry has fallen into me like a burning gutful of whisky. Wilbur seems alarmed at my sudden looseness, but he’s also strangely gleeful. I suspect he thinks that I’ve finally been stripped of my pretensions by this maddening solitude. I suspect he’s right.

A note:

A few days ago, during a solid Irish drunk, I heard off-key singing: “If I should call you up, invest a dime/ And you say you belong to me and ease my mind/ Imagine how the world could be, so very fine..” It took me awhile to identify the tune as the Turtles classic, “Happy Together.” It took me longer to identify the singing as my own.

A note:

I don’t think I’ve seen Kellie all week. Ruthie makes sure that she and Kellie remove to another part of the house at my approach, retreating and locking doors between us.

A note:

I plugged the phone back in the other day. Almost immediately, it rang. I picked it up and belted out my Turtles song at the top of my lungs. After regaling my anonymous caller a few times, I decided to take my act on the road. Ruthie had seen fit to hide my keys from me.

A note:

Two days ago, after witnessing Wilbur’s clueless reading of even a Bukowski poem, I threw a pen at him. That is, I threw a pen at Wilbur. Unfortunately, I’ve never had Bukowski within range. But you can bet that if I did, I’d give the old barfly the pen-throwing of his life. Anyways, I was so drunk that I telegraphed the whole throwing action, making it far too easy for him to dodge it. He quietly leaned over, picked up the pen, and said,

“A Montblanc Boheme Gold Citrin.”

Unimpressed by what may have been Wilbur’s single greatest show of polite learning thus far, I said, “smart ass,” and looked around for something larger and more expensive to throw at him.

A few minutes later, while Wilbur was picking the shards of a Lino Tagliapietra banjo-shaped handblown glass vase out of his hair, I collapsed a bit, wept a bit, and told him that he was my best—and only—friend. It seemed the right thing to do.

One side-effect of all this drinking is the wretched imposition of truthfulness. Another side-effect followed on the heels of this will to verity: the compulsion to narrate the most painful and embarrassing experiences of my life. While I halfheartedly cleaned his wounds and the floor, I poured out stories of my illustrious residence in some of California’s finer mental hospitals, my history with my bastard of a stepfather, and even the story of how I got my groove back. And I drank. Finally, as my tales were almost at an end and as the room began to sway, I got up to wrap gauze around Wilbur’s still-bleeding head. Looking down, my bleary eyes seemed to see green goop oozing from his skull. I vomited upon his head and shoulders. It seemed the right thing to do.

A note:

Even after all this, he came back yesterday. Such a puppy.

An exhortation:

So, gentle readers, consider this drunken jag an opportunity to ask me for any narrative and not be denied. For the moment, I am your bloated, bloodshot Sherezehade. I am naked, I am unabashed, and am drinking myself out of the recognition that my crest has fallen.