I find myself drinking with ghosts tonight. Probably because I couldn’t tempt the Devil to actually dance with me.
Guess that’s just what happens when you sold your soul years ago—it’s not like I was using it much, anyway.
Or maybe I got the music all wrong—I never really was particularly talented at properly setting a scene.
I just know a low angry moon punctured a concrete skyline red. It looked like the sky was bleeding. And it painted all the sidewalks in strange hues before the city shrugged off the shackles of twilight and transitioned itself back over into a more recognizable LED madness.
A familiar chill married itself to the wind blowing in from the direction of that big lake. The last lake in which bare toes touched the abrasive grip of the sand; the last time we touched water together.
I thought about that day while standing atop a bridge fingering out over the Grand. My brain has always been wired to put things with things—the damnable curse of hierarchical primates. And though terrifying, I always seem to find myself drawn to the comfort of water.
I stood alone in the twilight. Camouflaged inside a smokescreen of tobacco. Armoured in leather. And it was there I absorbed the refreshments of a different kind of water. The kind that burns. And dials down the clutter inside a head still trying to decipher the patterns of all these unfamiliar Q.D. Donut Munchers.
If you are ever unfortunate enough to get me talking about the writing, I have a tendency to whine about how hard it can be for me—just another rambling session of pour me. One which I try my best to deflect with witty barbs and clever wordplay.
That I’m just a drinker with a writing problem. That it’s like having homework for the rest of your life. That you have to actually live it, and then drink about it, before you can ever begin to bleed it out on the page—anything else is just a hollow, meaningless pose.
Admittedly, it seldom sorts itself out in that particular order, though. And that often makes things messy.
The simple truth is… words fucking haunt me. And leave me always scrambling to find that perfect pattern. Feeling condemned to an existence consisting solely of putting all the annoying little pieces in order, just to try and make some sense of it all.
Like the familiar terrors of that reoccurring dream. The one repeating on an endless loop; the one which stalks me so often, every detail is tattooed in my brain.
But that’s probably a story meant for another time.
Because it’s the kind of 517 night born of minor chords. And major mistakes—I witnessed the brilliant minds of my contemporaries die young. Too often in old parking lots.
And no one ever writes their stories.
So I wander alone through the falling embrace of this strange city. Just a mobile lump of high-proof compost out roaming far from its original state. One left angry that they questioned my choices. And generationally judged my black Irish ink.
I realize it’s been a lifetime lived in temper tantrums. And that got me nowhere. So there really isn’t much point in yelling at malicious ghosts anymore—I’d rather scream alone at the river, than be born again broken amongst the damned.
But I do find some comfort in the familiarity of this pattern.
Because soon there will come forth from the trees the sounds of a great parade. A joyful echo rattling deep amongst the beauty of the season of falling things. That brittle time of transition when the world reinvents herself underneath blankets of cauterizing white.
Maybe that is when my voice will finally sing the right fucking songs; maybe that is when the Devil will accept that ill-advised invitation to dance that final climatic dance.
In the changing seasons there remains a bountiful harvest of words. I want to catch them all before that angry weather blows in again off the big lake.
Because it’s a long time until the spring.
And I’m already starving….
