…of being what?

Well, first, I sit here drinking. An unenviable habit, perhaps. I am compelling myself to seek it out and wash in it for a while, contemplative. At what point do I begin to say ‘problem’, rather? I am almost to the point of budgeting for it with each paycheque. It is not any rotgut, yet is any better than the other?

This, the lagavulin 16yr Scotch, may not be the choice of every, yet I finish it alone. I’ve found it somewhat harsher in taste than expected – definitely ’smoky’. I attempt to discern hints of… anything, really, in the amber aromatic, yet cannot find a single clue. Intoxicating, certainly. I think I will go further afield for the next bottle.

The fluid in the glass, at close examination, is more viscous than thought; the eddies are positively immobile. Trapped eddies around a cube; forlorn.

If I thus plan out my alcoholic purchases, am I sane? Broke? Admitting to a casual defeat at the hands of that which is meant to bring my faculties low?

For – let’s be serious here – this is seen by few, and fewer still of these can distill my thought as easily as can this rather maudlin purchase of expensive spirits. To hold it in hand and ramble at length on its qualities and effects is, quite admittedly, self-serving, neurotic, and sublime.

-break here-

-a sip or two-

I think of home, and where that may be. What, of my many residences over the years, would I most call ‘home’? I can’t really name one – all having been sullied by some idea along the way. I feel that, with that in mind, I shall make my stamp upon the next most indelibly. I shall scar it and make it mine.

Someone at work, said that hydrogen peroxide, was lately found to help cause scars. It may heal, but at the cost of some surface appearance. And I think – it was one of the favourite tools of my mother, long ago. How many of my own surface abstractions do I owe to this? Small yet permanent affectations upon my skin that never heal. For all that I never had any major contusions, I had myriad scars, in various places. Shin. Groin. Belly. Arm. The back of my hands. Forehead. What have I surrendered? Nothing, perhaps… they are areas of tiny contemplation that leave only my imagination ground fecund.