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Forgiven me blogger, it's been one year, two months since my last post. I have sinned. I have taken my writing for granted. Cheated on the solace and clarity it can bring in exchange for drinks, streaming internet tv, and hundreds of other distractions, most significantly, a girlfriend. She encouraged me to start writing again. Even if it's just a little bit every day, on here or unpublished, I'm going to write more. Fuck it.

I just had a dream where I was in a college dorm and I was making out with Alicia while we were both wearing suits made of Cap'n Crunch cereal. We were eating each others suits and getting really into it. It was strange. It was if the food were sex. I can't remember any sex actually happening, but the eating was intercourse.

I haven't dreamed about the lake house in a while. My dreams have been so sporadic as my sleep has been diminished lately. It's hard to dream while drunk. The alcohol prevents you from passing the threshold into deep sleep where dreaming occurs. If I dream at all after drinking, it will happen later in the morning after the effects of the alcohol have worn off and even then, they are spare and unfulfilling. But I needed it to fall asleep. I needed it to slip away. To see how far I could fall off the face of the earth if only for a few hours, to not think anymore, to not obsess, to not feel dread.

--He woke up with the ritualistic confusion and pain that had become commonplace since the break began. His thoughts turned immediately to her. The same cycle of thought that had challenged his sleep earlier that morning. The other hotel guests were leaving their rooms and slamming their doors disaffectedly as they squinted into the late December morning, bags in hand. He curled back into the sheets and blankets and wanted so much to not feel this way. His lungs hurt from too many cigarettes and although he did not have a hangover, the sleepless night made the back of his eyes hurt.

Half a bottle of Jim Beam stood suspended in the bucket of melted ice on the bed side table. Enough clothes lay strewn around the room to give the illusion of home, although they would be packed away and all traces of his stay would be erased by the Indian couple that come to clean the room. He started thinking about what he did last night. Check in, first drink, tv, second drink, cigarette, third drink, swig from the bottle, cigarette. At that point he was having fun. Reverting back to those first few drunks as a teenager when it made you feel light-headed and careless. When, by the simple act of drinking, you could shave just a few years off your life when things could be funny without being ironic and you could act silly without feeling uncool.

He laughed to himself when he had realized what he had done after the nth drink of whiskey from the complimentary styrofoam coffee cups. He laughed at the dirtiness of it, the sheer vileness of the act. Few things he had ever conjured felt so wrong, and yet, had felt so natural when he did it.

He drifted off for the briefest flash and another door slammed and he was awake again. Those few minutes felt more refreshing than the entire night's sleep. He rolled out of bed and walked into the bathroom to take a piss. The hotel had ceiling tiles like they had in elementary school. The kind with the metal bars holding them up from which teacher hung paper jack-o-lanterns in the fall and colorful kites in the spring. He thought about poking them up just see if anyone had hidden anything elicit up there. A gun, drugs, a bag of money. He stood on the edge of the tub and lifted the tile and shards of insulation fell out, so he let it alone and just assumed that all that shit was up there anyway. He made a pot of coffee from the single-serve unit by the sink. He sat down and lit a cigarette and thought about turning on the tv, but knew it would all be shit, so he just sat there and made the effort to smoke and drink the watery coffee.

He thought about what it meant to drink alone. It's not so much drinking, but slowly digging yourself into the hole that will become sleep. There's nobody around to keep you on your toes, no reason to stay cogent with arguments with yourself. So alcohol does what it's meant to do, depresses your nervous system until there's nothing left to do but let it power down.

He opened the night stand drawer and pulled out the Gideon's Bible. It looked sad and mangled in a way. The pages were wrinkled so the front cover bowed out a little and the ink that covered the outside of the pages was splotchy. This confirmed it. He had done what he had talked about for years now. He opened to the book of Luke and the pages pulled together in clumps. The paper was so thin that his semen had drifted through the pages of all the way back to Lamentations. He closed the book and put it back in the drawer with a hint of guilt. He shook it off and lit another cigarette.