So, how much gin did you drink last night? Or was it bourbon? Or are you one of those types whose palpable melancholy raps at an inner-sympathy available to some, if not others, the type that drinks silently, alone, but perhaps does so with style; i.e. scotch? Was it scotch? A lot of scotch? Well, whatever the spirit, it has drained your own. It shows. I corner-eye glance as you drive by: your grey expression a pallid bloodshot frame, the noxious mauve-pink of high-blood pressure that comes from too much drink, too many cigarettes and a lack-of-will to halt either. A sidling glance as you drive down a parking lot lane: an expression feverish, automatic and grey. Everything outside of your gaze runs out as a blurry gauze of nuisance, a burden, that from which emanates all of your ills: the litany of bullshit, the nutrient-rich resource of unfailing unyielding crap, relentless enforcer of worldly aggravations that—so perceived from behind your grey glance, under glass of your beat-down Volvo—drives you to drink off a Friday night, your Thursday and Wednesday nights, your days / nights co-mingling in an effluvia of relentless time. All of time lay bolted to an indifferent juggernaut inching-by with an audible groan. That’s what I see in your vacuous stare: the impending sloth-like pain of stewed / simmering misery. I see human wreckage, the crush of perceived — quite possibly real — ‘wrongs,’ ‘ills,’ ‘unfairnesses.’ I see in the runnels of wrinkles running over your grey mien (aged prematurely, I have to guess) a life lost, a campaign having relented to slow defeat and simply absorbing, without a fight, the end-markers of attrition. I see you out and about and slowly moving down parking lot lane: an automatic moment inside inescapable defeat. You have lost. And yet you live. And yet how do you live if you know you have already lost? The end is no mystery; but then there are the minutes, the hours, the days and weeks and years left to wallow about, knowing of fate. How do you live behind the grey face? Do you drink off the fate? (Can you drink off a fate?) Is that why it’s clear you drank too much gin or bourbon last night? Or was it scotch? I have to think it was not scotch. By the look of your bruised and battered Volvo, I gather you place greater trust in volume over quality. One cannot drown the pain of defeat in quality ~