i only wish to drink enough to become a poet again

every little thing after another

forest withdrawals

the ivory tower of tearlessness

i don't particularly like drinking or being drunk. there's no self to lose in it and only a strange and uncomfortable proprioceptive experience ensues. my friends love to drink. i love to try to escape, but i feel i've already escaped in some sense of the thing. the place i've found my experience in is no lock that alcohol can pick. i don't believe in a me. i am an organism with a particular sense of the world that has organized itself into a unit. i enjoy organizing things. sometimes organizing overwhelms me. so i disorganize, and then i am only a collection of things and wants and neurotransmitters. which is fine, and it makes the whole idea of life and biology and death very serene. i enjoy being an experience, guided by the organism eliciting it. but the problem is that something strange is still there outside the self. and really, maybe this is just the problem with the idea of a self. i attributed my pain to my self for many years. i was in pain because i was a self trapped inside a body. but i would not have been in any less pain if i was a self without a body or if i was merely a body without a self, as i've found. the pain is visceral in an all encompassing sense. it is built into the biology of this organism. a drink doesn't escape this, it just makes the whole experience of it much stranger. but i suppose maybe this is the point too. strange becomes disorganization and disorganization eases the pain of pretending you're not. at least when you stop fighting for it.

when i feel my time slipping away, i wonder what it felt like to live and not survive. there is a nagging that tells me i'm not long for this world, and some days i feel i haunt it already. the sky feels too low, my thoughts move too slow. and while days like these used to scare me, they are less painful if i am not afraid. yet somehow, i feel so lost without them. have i slept enough, have i ate? did i take my medication? what deficiency has plagued my body and deteriorated my brain, today? there is no motivation other than the dissent of this feeling that leads me to feed and rest my body. where do the rest of them get the motivation to live? to bake elaborate meals and shovel matter down their throats? what is not exciting to my mind is not exciting to my body. and here in the power struggle between the ghost and its machine is where my illness thrives.