#drinkin

(A completely self indulgent, self pity party a sorcerer should not engage in.)

I drank. Way, way too much. Hard liquor strikes again.

I woke up around 2 a.m., face first in the dirt. Fine, powdery mountain soil filled my mouth and nostrils. Pitch black. A faint glow seeped through the towering pines, barely enough to make out the shadows. I should have passed out in an aspen grove instead of wherever the hell I was.

My phone lay shattered beneath me. No watch. That was bad. Terrible. Horrifying thoughts clawed at my mind.

Did the phone die before I blacked out, or after I burned a hell of a lot of bridges?

Did I love bomb someone I shouldn't have?

Drunk dial everyone?

Worse, was there, for some unknown reason, data service this far out in the middle of nowhere?

Did I post on social media?

Shit, did I do all of them?

I pushed myself upright, wiping fine dirt onto my shirt. Something had gone very, very wrong.

I ran through a check my ex flame had drilled into me years ago: testicles, spectacles, wallet, watch. She had done it to make fun of her private Catholic school upbringing, and dammit, it stuck.

Wallet and keys.

A start.

Then I felt it, turned my head, and saw it.

A demon.

I was AP shifted enough to see it.

It was going for the dark swirling mass with sparkles while at the same time showing my mind a seven foot tall snake looking creature with many red arms. This did not phase me. First, I was drunk. Second, it is your mind's interpretation of energy that it wants to show you.

A supernatural movie, essentially.

All I knew was that it was grinning behind all those teeth, telling me they had gone after the people who had made me angry, satisfaction obvious in its communication.

That was when I realized something unsettling.

I was angry.

Not irritated.

Not annoyed.

Furious.

A deep, burning kind of fury that felt older than I am, and maybe it was.

I know well the ability of such beings to incite and inflame human passions. IOBs, demons, Neverborn. They are old. So old they know exactly the right pressure to apply. Exactly how, where, and when.

That is why they are rarely noticed by the average person.

Surely this was not entirely my own fury?

I hoped not.

The thing about demons is they do not care who started it.

They do not care who is right.

They do not care who is wrong.

They are like fear seeking missiles.

All they need is a target and permission.

Being drunk enough to have no logic, no restraint, and no sense?

A perfect storm for one who practices sorcery.

That is the opening.

That is the invitation.

Energy is energy.

Though there are exceptions.

One of them is embedded in my left side, a little above the hip. A dull red light. An infernal.

I did not name it that.

A spirit that helped me cast out five to seven other demons did.

It thought attempts to dislodge it were amusing.

It likes to show itself to my mind as a Victorian English gentleman sitting in a high backed leather chair in a dark, cozy red room lined with old leather books, a fire burning nearby, smoking a pipe.

As with all the powerful ones, they hide their faces from me. I personally think they somehow interfere with the creation of short and long term memories.

A cheeky bastard.

Still, I could not picture it actually doing much unless I was dying.

Probably not even then.

I am not even certain how, where, or when it became attached to me.

But I have ideas.

I remembered making a fire.

That part stood out clearly.

Yet now the entire place was deserted.

Not quiet.

Deserted.

The difference matters.

Campfires cold.

No voices.

No laughter.

No movement.

Just the trees.

What the fuck did I do?

I remembered only one camp and being handed more alcohol there.

What the hell had I done?

Luckily, I am a happy drunk if overly chatty.

My brain opens up and I talk about local lore, Bigfoot sightings, where various spirits of the dead like to inhabit, and the constant, never ending UFO sightings all around the area.

I even carry a detailed picture on my phone of a large ship, several hundred feet long, taken at a location almost visible from where I was, around 8,600 feet up. I took it to get my point across that I am telling the truth.

I am an engaging teller of stories and tales, even if I tend to speak only of things I consider real.

People are generally enraptured and entertained.

I checked myself over.

No broken nose.

Though it hurt.

My ribs felt wrong.

Maybe from a fall.

Maybe from something else.

My knees were bruised.

My legs were bruised.

My forearms were bruised.

Large bruises wrapped around my ribs and stomach.

Cuts everywhere.

If there had been one fight, maybe.

Two fights, maybe.

Three fights?

I could not imagine it.

Most likely I had done all of this to myself.

The wallet turned up underneath me.

Filled with dirt.

That sparked a whole new worry.

Had someone copied my cards?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Why was it not in my pocket?

The keys eventually appeared after enough feeling around through the dirt.

My glasses were still perched on my face, perfectly intact.

Small miracles.

That was another surprise.

Nobody had stolen the SUV and pushed it over a cliff.

Somebody had definitely gone through it.

But it was my thrasher 4x4.

A few tools.

Some wood.

Emergency repair supplies.

Nothing worth taking unless you were a serious asshole.

Then came two days in bed.

Shame and horror from not knowing.

I had drunk enough that reality simply stopped for eight hours.

What had I done during that time?

I had not checked back with the IOBs.

I hoped they had not actually harmed anyone, unless they were the ones rifling through my vehicle and going through my wallet.

If so, they could have them.

But why leave in the middle of the night?

Stay until dawn, at least, to mock the drunk guy.

Maybe they thought I was dead.

Still, I knew they had been up to no good.

A slight fear crossed my mind.

Did I leave a gun behind the seat, as was my custom?

With a grateful breath, I remembered I had gone to the doctor for an MRI, one of the things that instigated the drinking, so I had left it at home.

I still had not checked under the seats for snow chains and other things worth stealing.

That would happen in the morning.

And if things were missing?

Then the Neverborn could sort it out.

On purpose and with full intent this time.

A couple of days later, I got a new phone.

The timing could not have been worse.

I had just rebuilt my laptop while helping track down some hackers bothering my nephew.

Once you have done that kind of work, trust evaporates.

You strip everything to bare metal.

DOD wipe it.

Start over.

That laptop had been my backup.

I should have taken an extra day or two to set up virtual machines.

Long story short, my digital life was gone.

Phone numbers.

Addresses.

Messages.

All of it.

RCS and triple file encryption saw to that.

No Signal.

No Telegram.

No social media beyond scraps I had written down here and there.

eSIMs are a special kind of misery.

No onboard memory.

No fallback.

No little card to pull out and save.

And Pixels only have internal storage.

Once it was gone, it was gone.

A paranoid person like myself does not use online backups unless they are triple encrypted, and I had been lax in my backup procedures.

At that point, I had no idea who was angry with me.

No idea who thought I had disappeared.

No idea who had written me off forever.

Outside of four or five family numbers I still remembered, everyone else had effectively vanished.

The strange part?

I was between jobs.

No work contacts.

No office wondering where I was.

No manager calling.

That was somehow the brightest part of the entire disaster.

The thought crossed my mind, and I considered it openly.

Load up one of the vehicles.

Handle a few assets.

Leave.

Just leave.

Nothing was really holding me in place.

I had become a ghost.

And in the process, ghosted everyone else.

Amazing how much of our lives exist inside a rectangle of glass and silicon.

Lose it, and entire worlds disappear.

Maybe a clean sweep would not be so bad.

New phone number.

Fresh start.

Maybe even a different first name.

Nothing legal.

Just something disconnected from decades of history.

There is a certain appeal to walking away from everything.

Everyone.

Every expectation.

Every version of yourself that other people think they know.

For now, though, this account survives.

Assuming it still exists tomorrow.

Assuming this side blog survives too.

Though one thing is certain.

It desperately needs a better name.

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