Habitual Aimlessness, Persistent Drunkenness

Humor me as I saw fit a needless admission of guilt; secondly, a disclosure of a certain difficulty.

Guilt because I have never own up, and have been routinely drifting off from reality. Disclosure because I have never been too candid about anything true.

That is about to change. Optimistically speaking.

Cloaked with the comfort of cyber-anonymity I can be completely honest about certain deep-seated personal issues. I can bleed all my thoughts in the daunting expanse of the online universe without being beholden to restrictive harness of tact, which, to me, is a kind handicap in real life when you can’t be all-too straightforward without precipitating offence.

I am here, right now, in this awkward fork crippled by both the anticipation of adventures and the paralysis of uncertain fears. A certain fraction of me lords over, barking self-assured impositions, armed with a can-do, take-charge mentality that would like to shame my wimpy tendencies. While the other fragments at the back of my head reason out, citing level-headedness, sensibility, temperament.

But when do I ever listen to reason?

By nature, I am intoxicated, plagued with the glamour of fearless aimlessness. And there are snippets and bruises from long ago that keep on recoiling from bolted attics. They surface, startling in between breathing spaces to glue and ground both feet, staring you down, and pinning you into many of your denied vulnerabilities.

Memories like these make me recall that disquieting scene in The Legend Of Bagger Vance. In a believable spark of bitter, distorted discernment Rannulp Junuh, a promisingly gifted golfer weighed down by past war hostilities and an aborted love, monologues:

The question on the table is ‘How drunk is drunk enough?’

The answer is that it’s all a matter of brain cells. You see, every drink of liquor you take kills a thousand brain cells. But that doesn’t matter, ‘cause we got millions more. And first the sadness cells die, so you smile really big. And the quiet cells go, so you just say everything really loud for no reason at all. But that’s okay, because the stupid cells go next, so everything you say is real smart. And finally... Come the memory cells.

These are tough sons and bitches to kill.

I’d raise double vodka tonics to that no matter how improbable the challenge.

But here’s the thing aside from exorcising the pestilence of the memory: Like most online dwellers I resort to shameless self-promotion, make my presence felt, for one widespread, conventional motive: a desired connection with someone in the far-flung nodes of cyberspace to fill a particular emotional (and most often, sexual) thirst. I am however aware that this premise is the most unfair reason to start, as individuals are not to be possessed. Was it Kahlil Gibran, in a fertile torrent of wisdom and inspiration, who once wrote:

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;For love is sufficient unto love.

Yes, the perpetual elusiveness of that one thing much desired but always dodges our frenzied grasps.

But it wouldn’t stop us, in our foolish quixotic hope that it would take another human being to nullify our needy hungers.

If memory serves me right I’d punctuate this rather rambling overture with an insight I pilfered from a rather spectacular Wang Kar-Wai's movie 2064. It is irresistible (especially for a certain breed where I belong) for it’s abundance of bittersweet, soaking melancholy.

In one insightful scene, the eternally relationship-abortive writer (Tony Leung) postulates:

Love is a Matter of timing. It’s no good meeting the right person too soon or too late.

I wish he’s ridiculously wrong.

What really gets you is that he’s absurdly right.