The Drink of Darkness

 April 29, 2024

    I went to AA today. It was the first time since Auckland. That was about 6 months ago. 

    I drank again on Saturday night. That was a pretty bad night. I got into town and found the place swarming with college kids. It took me by surprise. 

    I was being really annoying. I got extremely drunk. I tried calling tons of people on messenger, like I always do. No one answered. They probably know to not answer me because I’ll be drunk. 

    I don’t remember going to bed. All I know is that in the morning there was a knock on my door. I didn’t respond. Then my door opened and either Leila or Josh put my jeans into my room. I guess they were on the floor of the hallway. I have no memory of taking them off out there. 

    I really can’t believe I didn’t drink water when I got home. I should’ve drank tons of water and stayed awake for a little while until I’d sobered up. I never fucking learn my lesson. That’s what happens why I go to sleep while being wasted. I do weird sleep walking shit. It’s a fucking miracle I didn’t take a piss in the hallway. I really can’t believe the fact that I never learn. I repeat the same stupid shit over and over again.

    So yesterday was pretty dark. I felt absolutely pathetic and horrific. I finally decided to go to AA. I’m glad I did. 

    I also applied to York today. It cost $130. 

    I went for a jog this morning. It was the first time in a while. I want to get back to jogging ever day. 

    I’m a little stressed about my two jobs. I got my schedule for Dimitri’s and they have me working until close on Thursday. I’m supposed to go out with Mark and Jayne at 6. I forgot to tell work about that. I’m going to have to ask them tomorrow. I hope it’ll be alright, because they also have Nate, Jacob, George and Eli scheduled for that evening. 
    If they say no then I don’t know what I’ll do. Jayne has already booked a table for us at 6:30pm. It’s her birthday dinner. 

    The soldier sat in the sun. He was burning to a crisp. He’d been sat there for 20 days! 
The Godhead descended before the burning soldier.
“Speak to me,” begged the combat veteran.
“Open yourself up to the inner wellspring of truth,” whispered the Godhead.
The soldier blinked and began to cry. His tears put out the flames. He began to heal!

Lazy people are hurting They’re living on a cobble stone footpath. They have to sleep in tents. They only have raw meat to eat. They’r surviving on cans of beer. The whole town has become drunk.

I interviewed a little boy. He wore a yellow raincoat. The boy was drunk. He had a bottle of whiskey in his hand. It was his only companion.
“How do you remain hopeful?” I asked.

The child laughed and burped. He hiccuped, and then he burped again. “I have a strong conviction. I also have faith in my ideas,” the boy declared, his voice high and shrill. “I’m no patriot. I place my trust in myself. My loyalty lies to my mother and to my father. Our unit of power is destined to sustain us. The state cannot help me. They have proven themselves deceitful.”

I was turned off by the odour coming from the child. It was a real bad scent. I did not want to be rude, but I could hardly resist wrinkling my nose in disgust.

A Reasonable Raisin

 Apr 25, 2024

    I’m at home. It feels weird calling this home. I just don’t feel at ease. I guess there’s a lot of things that I could do about that. The lights here in the room are not pleasant. They’re really bright, and they’re cold. I wanted a lamp since I arrived but I never got around to getting one. 

    My roommates are friendly, but I don’t feel any connection. I just feel like I’m in somebody else’s house. 

    I started drinking again on Saturday. It was completely unexpected. I’ve been craving weed for a really long time. It’s been slowly building up in me. I’ve been fantasizing smoking a joint by the boardwalk in Toronto. It’s been in my dreams. I hadn’t tried very hard to get any here in Christchurch. I figured it would probably be best that I didn’t. It’s not like Canada where I can just walk into a shop and buy a joint. You have to know people here. 

    I found a Facebook group where people seemed to be selling. I didn’t post for a little while. 

    On Saturday I was with Mark and Jayne. I posted a message that morning asking if anyone knew how I could pick up in. My message wasn’t being posted. It had to first be approved by the moderator. 

    I was getting restless by the time I got home. It was getting late and I was really craving at that point. It got to the point where I felt already high, or dazed. This mania sets in when I start to crave. My vision seems to get funny. It’s like everything looks a bit fuzzy. It’s the restless feeling of having decided to get high and then not being able to do it. At some point I started considering beer. I hadn’t been thinking about alcohol at all before. It was just weed. I started craving it and fantasizing how it would feel. I just wanted to ‘altered’ in someway.

So I walked to the grocery store. I bought two 6-packs and cigarettes. It came to about $70. I drank a bit in the park. I smoked a few cigarettes. Then I came back and hung out in my room for a bit. 

Eventually I left the house and looked for a bar. It turned out to be a very long and extremely boring night. I just wandered from place to place, chatting with random people. It’s what always happens. The walk home was particularly depressing. I just wanted to be dead. I felt so hopeless. 

I drank again on Tuesday night. I bought another 12 beers after work. I had about 10 at home. I have foggy memories of that, exact I remember going downstairs and vomiting in the toilet. That was weird, because I don’t think I’ve ever thrown up so early in the night. 

I went out after that and started wandering the streets. I bumped into some other guy at one point. I started walking with him. He had weed and he gave me about a gram in exchange for cigarettes. I didn’t have any so we went and bought some. 

    I remember walking with him for a long time. I don’t know where we were going or what the plan was. It might’ve been to go back to his place to smoke weed. At some point we separated at a bus stop. He was going to stay there and catch a bus. I had no idea where I was but then I recognized one of Christchurch’s only tall buildings not far away. So I walked in that direction. 

I went to to some bars and just chatted with people. It was pretty boring as usual. I stared heading home at the end of the night. 

    I wanted to smoke the weed first, though. I was trying to pack it into one of my cigarettes. It wasn’t working. Two random guys showed up. I started chatting with them.

    I can’t really remember what we said but suddenly I was walking with them. They had a pop can and we were going to turn that into a bong. We sat on a ledge and hung out for a little while. I gave them one of my beers. After I’d smoked I got up and headed home. 

That walk was what I had been craving for months, which was to be drunk and high listening to music I’ve made. That’s like peak pleasure in my mind. It turned out to be pretty bland and dull. I felt so numb and out of it that I could hardly pay attention to the music. I was just in my head. It felt like dreaming, or being asleep. I have almost no memory of the walk home. 

I was going to go to AA today. There was one at 6:30 pm by Hagley Park. I finished work at 3. I was going to hang out in the library for a couple hours. The library was closed because today is Anzac Day, which is like remembrance day. I walked home instead. 

I haven’t been to AA in Christchurch. That’s probably why all of this happened. All of the meetings are at weird times and nowhere near my place. In Melbourne they were everywhere, and all day long. The sizes of the two cities aren’t comparable, though. Melbourne has around 5 million and Christchurch has around half a million. 

Tomorrow will be my last day working with Dimitri. I’m very happy about that. He will be in Greece for 7 weeks. I don’t really expect to still be here by the time he gets back. I kind of hope I’ll be gone. I’m planning on going to Montreal to stay with Mami for a little bit. I’m not too sure after that. 

Migraine Time

April 16, 2024

The last few days have felt intense. I tried to quit my job the other day. Working with Dimitri is too much for me. He’s been following me around and critiquing everything little thing I do. It sees endless.  

I told Despina that I hadn’t been feeling very good lately. I told her that maybe I should quit. She said to go talk to Dimitri. I went outside and found him. I told him that I thought I should quit. He started talking a whole bunch. He started telling me all the things I was doing wrong. He kept going and going. He seemed to be telling me to stay. I was kind of confused. 

I asked why he wanted me to stay, if I wasn’t doing very well. He basically just talked for a long time. I just sat there and nodded my head and said’ yup yup yup’. He used a lot of words to basically say I wasn’t trying very hard and that I should stay and try again. 

I’ve felt completely exhausted. I don’t ever feel calm or relaxed when Dimitri is around. I’m constantly on edge. Even my dreams are filled with arguments. That energy seems to follow me around. 

He’s constantly changing the way he does stuff around the shop. And he seems to think he’s been doing everything the same way for 40 years. He’s always accusing me of not listening to him. 

He wants things done the way he does them. He’s like this controlling dictator. 

It’s the opposite of all the jobs I’ve ever had. Quality and consistency are usually the most important things. Everyone at the Fox had a slightly different way of doing things. As long as the job was done well.

 He would say that he agrees with that, but what he really wants is for me to mirror his every move. He also seems to want me to match his energy, which is chaotic and frantic.

And I can’t talk with him. It literally feels like arguing with a bird or a robot. I don’t feel like there’s anybody there. It feels like speaking to a shell. It feels like he’s never really listening. 

He’s meant to go to Greece for all of May. That means I’ve got another week and a half of him. I don’t want to be working there when he gets back.

I’ve got $1000 left on my credit card. That feels pretty amazing. It should be payed off pretty soon. It seems to be going pretty fast. I think I only got down to $1900 when I left Melbourne. I don’t know why I payed off so little. I guess because I was drinking so much. 

It had gone all the way back to $4500 when I moved into this place. I don’t know how that happened. I wasn’t drinking at all in New Zealand. The most expensive thing I bought was a lens, which was $800. The hostels were also extremely expensive. It still amazes me how it can add up so fast.

The debt started when I left Yoga and Pablo’s place. So it’s been about a year of trying to pay it off. 
Working for Jane and Mark has been the exact opposite of Dimitri's. It’s a real dream job. I feel pretty lucky to have found it. I started working with them on Sundays as well. I take Jane to church in the evening. 

A great big cruise ship sails through the sea.
Sea horses and turtles swim beneath the hull. 
The sun shines bright and happily. 
An island full apes watch the approaching ship. 
Everyone is waving from the ocean liner. 
The captain laughs in the cockpit. 
Children are fishing from the side of the boat. 
The bats from above are floating in the air. 
A fishing boat laughs as they are eaten by sharks. 
Hungry whales swim through the ocean. They eat up all of the life. 
A UFO floats below the sea. 

Eclipse

April 9, 2024

The budding apprentice was called forwards. Blue tiles lined the walls. The air was fresh. It was coming through the window.

“How many more hours until the sun rises?” Asked the patriot.
“The light enters your body in 15 minutes,” responded a naked narcotics agent.
An albatross chirped in the corner. 
I painted a scene and then I exited slowly. 

The hallway continued down into infinity. The art on the wall was beautiful. It was like a million miles of sound. Even the escalators were moving in the right direction.

The officer crept into his son’s bedroom. The little lad was fast asleep against a pink bed! 
The officer laughed quietly. “That’s my son!” He whispered. “My child will grow to cook souvlaki.”

The officer grew short and angry over the years. He was burning inside. His whole world revolved around emotion. He was like a thunder storm. 

The wind was keeping secrets. 
The harvest could not come soon enough. It was only about half-past noon. That meant ten more hours of rain. 

The farmer sat on his porch. He patiently awaited the drought.
“How do you pickle a tuna?” Asked a young servant.
The farmer thought for a while. He scratched his chin like he was some Greek playwright. Then he stood up, a bucket of corn falling from his asshole.
“The answer to that question goes something like this.”

The farmer proceeded to tell a tale of forgiveness. The epic concluded with a theatrical show of moaning. The detailed description was good. The servant had been answered. 

The farmer was generous with his wisdom. He was something of an absolutist. He was the last of his kind. His father had been there when Hermaphrodite stormed the senate. He was born into a legacy that no child should inherit. 

“Today is the eclipse! The entire world is being affected!” Said the child.
“But you knew that already,” said his mother. “Pull in your line. Let’s go home.”
The young child bowed his head in silent sadness. He reeled in his line. Mother paddled them towards a shipwreck.