Your silent eyes greet me as wolves of indignation.
"You've been drinking again, haven't you?"
Instantly, my mind divides into committees and subcommittees, an elaborate bureaucracy intent on deriving the best possible solution to the situation at hand. The morality of truth is not a consideration. If I tell her flat out, 'No, I haven't been drinking,' will that be proven unrealistic because of the slur in which I deliver the answer? Might I say yes? "And fuck you for asking! This is my life and I'll do what a I please." There is always the diplomatic approach. "Awww, honey, the boss took a few of us out for drinks and I only had a couple."
Fuck this bureaucracy. I have a hard enough time stomaching the tangible and political, let alone the fuckers that reside in my own goddamned head. She knows. She knows the sound of my gentle sober voice. She knows how I lash out from a weak and defensive position. She knows that I never have just a couple. She is in love with me, and she feeds upon my weakness.
12
Numerology has a reputation for being the recourse of the dull-witted or the obsession of the Nostradamus-dick-sucking self-described literati. I tend to dumb things down a bit. I won't even bore you with the pattern recognition evident in the number 12 within our culture. Yes, yes, OUR culture. It really doesn't matter which culture I am in, or subscribe to, because you will find the necessary relevance anyway. It is what you are built to do.
They say that they are baby steps. Just one little step at a time; one day at a time. "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time." You think that you can do it, such manageable little chunks of information, until you reach another magic number: 4.
"4. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself."
At first glance, there is no problem. It is only upon close examination of the porous, absorbent nature of the human soul that you begin to realize just how saturated with pain you have become. Your $.99 BIC pen is already shaking with the force of your chakra-tremors as you try to apply pain to paper. Blood would be an appropriate substitute. You read. You say that 'there is nothing here, nothing in this heart of mine, nothing in my relentless mind.' You write. You sweat blood like Christ. You gasp at the Marianas Trench of depth that your soul encompasses.
You come up for air only to realize that you have spent your worth on stained paper. Baby's got the bends. This alone is the greatest accomplishment of your life. So insignificant, and yet the anchor that holds your being to this reality. Your feet are dangling off the precipice of a cliff while your hands grasp this tuft of grass that is your being penned on paper. Material possessions hack soul-coughing spit upon your wasteland. God is your father sitting unshirted on his dated couch, a beer-can in hand, while he shakes his head in disconcertment. You are not special. You will die here too. This is now, and before you is the salvaged beauty of a wrecked home, repaired by the back-breaking labor of a thousand humanitarians bent on saving the whales for the next generation. You are god.
You are shit.
You are you and you are one, indivisible from that which rendered you, complete and desired by the whole of reality.