Undercooked egg

Oh life! How like an egg you are! Such a delicate balance between delicious and disgusting! Sometimes you satisfy, sometimes I have to scrape parts of you from the bottom to get anything good. I sop you up sometimes and other times you bite back with an errant piece of hard, jagged shell. How, like eggs, I only enjoy you and everything within you under very specific circumstances.

Enough of that. Let me tell you how much I've matured. I've reached yet another signpost that reads, in fading spray paint on ratty old piece of driftwood, haphazardly nailed to the base of an old power line at the edge of a mostly abandoned, dusty town called "Adult Hood". It reads, simply, "DRINK LESS." I came upon the sign at 3am on Saturday night after drinking too much wine and trapping a good friend at my front door with morose talk of dying and meaning and being adrift in nothing. I think guilt and embarrassment floated into my room in the dead of the night and ripped off my down comforter and said nothing. It just floated right above my head, staring. And I can take feeling a lot of different things but guilt mixed with embarrassment and chased with the just the faintest traces of leftover hubris is something I simply cannot abide. Strangely that perfect storm of bad feeling, that first forkful of undercooked egg has only happened in recent times when I've had just slightly too much to drink.

When I first started drinking, I was always among my peers, also just starting to drink. I was assured to do and say stupid things in tandem with at least one other person. Being stupid, talking stupid just feels so much better when you aren't doing it alone. At the very least, there is an understanding that drinkers have among themselves, a kind of stupidity kinship. There's real empathy when you are around people who have done dumb drunken things before. Also, all those sentences were punctuated with the unspoken fact of my age. It was a good excuse for me when I was feeling low to simply say, well, I'm young. I'll be better when I get older.

Yeah, I got older awhile ago.

Inevitably, no matter how much fun I had (and I DID have fun on Saturday night), I'll stumble into my bedroom with the low hum of my room's own nightlife ticking away and settling in. And I'm already so susceptible to faint dread in my sober state. Faint dread, by the way in case you are wondering is way worse than actual, obvious dread for the sheer stealth and stamina it has. And crawling into bed intoxicated assures I'll be up in about two hours after passing out and after the thirst induced dreams of filling ice cube trays and drinking cold water from them. That's when the deep dark night will feel so dense and black and I'll be feeling so bad, even if it is a brief, quiet kind of feeling bad and for all my waking pessimism, I have to admit that it only happens that way after some booze.

 It isn't a quadratic equation. Just simple, elementary subtraction. A basic process of elimination.

And maybe a white noise machine? Or a dachshund puppy?