Clarity and focus - I hear you knocking but you can't come in

Everyone's off the booze, grinding out last cigarette butts on sun-warmed footpaths and walking away home, away from the bar, home to sit down and think out their sins. Fuck that.

It's taken me years to work up to being able to drink three whole beers in one night. It took me years to work up the courage to throw thinking to the wind and ram my head against fogged logic with joyful steps. It's taken me years to work up the stamina to be able to drink not even half what the rest of Slammatown throws down the hatch on an average Wednesday night. Now everyone's staring at me like I stood up in a mosque with a bottle of whiskey in my hand and poured out a blessing to the infidels. Fuck them.


I remember that summer, maybe it was two years ago, the summer of gin. Everybody sitting in the graveyard drinking bottles and bottles of gin. Every night. Sitting on headstones crooning out old songs pretending like they didn't spend that five sober minutes a day, between hangover and headstone, wondering how they managed to break their own hearts. I remember that long red-dirt of a summer. I was sitting in the grass in the graveyard watching the world drink itself to death while I knocked back one cider, maybe two. You all unwound your happy homes while I walked sober and alone.

People are dragging wagons from corner to corner of this shit-stained salt mine of a city. I'm not about to start dragging anything. I'm tired of clarity of focus broken only by small evenings drinking with just one or two friends until I feel like my tongue is unlashed just a little then walking home relatively sober and alone. Fuck that.

It's taken me years to work out how to drink until I am drunk. It's taken me years to deflect the lightning bolts of clear and logical thinking. For months now I have laboured, drawn buckets of focus while you bastards pranced around with guitars getting drunk. I got the issue to print. It's there now. It's at the fucking printers. I want to surge unbound into that swirling godless storm you've all been living in for years, you soulless bastards.

I've been pushing too hard and thinking too long. I've been thinking so long my cog wheels are grinding sparks. I think it's about time I set some fires.



Comments