Paincourt Antique

Title: Open Conversation with a Toilet Bowl

Many centuries ago a man ordained Saint Patrick drove all of the snakes from Ireland. In case you didn't know, the snakes were actually pagans, Jews, and gypsies. But this is not my point, I really could care a less today about all the hideous things that happened to potentially hideous people over the aeons of human misery and suffering.

I am not even concerned about whether or not I will make it to work in the morning or whether or not I have a successful relationship with anyone, so why should I give a rats ass about dead gypsies?

First off, lets not talk of any drunken escapades. I do not feel like ruminating on the glories of past blackouts and perversions. Today, I feel like bitching at you!

For many years now you have been a true friend, a friend who has kept me from being anything I ever loathed to be in my youth. I did not grow up and be a managerial type responsible for ridding corporations of lazy louts. Instead, it was I who was many times asked to shed my smock or apron. I did not grow to become a vicious businessman or salesman driven by profit and commodities. To the contrary, I lack certain commodities almost to default. Spending countless hours and dollars in a kaleidoscope of bars and taverns throughout the world has seen to that. In a romantic sense I have held snuggly to my adolescent visions of what a life should be. I have retarded my mental growth by at least 5 years by wandering through a desert of mentholated breath and insane irrefutable behavior.

I have spurned many a motherly maiden hoping to change my evil ways and bring me over to the positive side of a straight life. All this I have done for you, the clever and silly Bacchus. This I have done and asked nothing in return except for the will and ability to continue doing so. Much pleasure I receive from this rotten way! I have destroyed myself nearly beyond repair at times and have long forgotten how to beg forgiveness from any judgmental deity. I delivered myself back into your arms again and again. I was to die in your arms. I was to be buried in a wine cask! The worms should be drunk on my hints of oak and the sweet bouquet that pervades my alcohol soaked corpse.

And on this eve of the greatest day of drinking on any given year, it is to you that I say; you have forgotten me for I can not drink. You have pushed me aside in the most cruel and casual way. I am a child lost on a dark wooded path without you. Do I hear the wolves of conviction and sobriety howling in the distance? You filled me with courage and kind stupidity and now I will be left with a mean and thinking insight that you would strip away from me so that I could be sociable and malleable. Who knows what great adventures you and I could have? We might find a dirty lass to comfort our sorrow, or another fellow worshiper to spar each other and validate our anger. Hell, we might wake up in Memphis Tennessee having not one clue as to how we arrived!

But on this holiday we will not, we will wake up in our bed, next to our wife, without a scar or a bruise to prove my devotion to you. Is it so much my fault that I do not drink on this day of all days as it is yours to not sway my will? If you do not sway my will, your most forgiving follower, then do you even exist?

Rise from the liquor store the corner bar and prove your devotion to me Bacchus! For once I would appreciate being chased. For ten years or more I have chased you and your cousins into many dark alleys and heard a voice that would sometimes say, "Do not go there." Yet I, agree with you time after time that we must see what is over the next hill, what lies beyond the next trash heap! And on this week I hear no voice, no call to arms. I must say that I am disappointed and will from now on view our relationship as a friendly fuck as opposed to the marriage of convenience we once had. Now, I wonder what the odds are that I will still drink come Saint Pat's?

Shit, pretty high. Oh well that was a nice try anyway.

2010 Addendum: Look at me, I am an alcoholic!