Stutter steps and rumination, the cessation of the sensation of attainment. You see I achieved a level of mediocrity and proclaimed it to be the pinnacle. A cynical misanthropic hot shit who meanders off topic and falters. Stumbling, staccato stratification, words placed in containment, on some insane shit strapped to the lally column in the basement.

Things I will quit today: procrastinating, dangerous behavior. Things I will quit eventually: opiates, amphetamines, tobacco (mouth), procrastinating. Things I want to quit: none

Things I want to do tonite: push a weak premise until it shits out nothing but punctuation.

Things Ive done tonite :

My friends, at 31, if I'm enjoying the Private Stock, I wonder what dusty bottle sits on the bottom shelf. If this is the premium, whats in the well? Well, Ive made a list.

I am thankful for: Whitney, Jasper, my dad, my evil female twin who is actually 34 and female, my job.... my experiences : I was one of those shitheads who shouldn't have survived his teens, never mind his twenties, and in my nascent 30s I feel like a soldier without a war. For the past 16 years I have done a fuck of a job trying to kill myself. A ouja board told me Id be dead by 17, so I told my parents Id be rich by 21. Y2K didn't drop a 747 on my head like the cabbie told me it would, I was hitchhiking after my car ran out gas when I had a headfull of blue gelltab acid.

Fuck. There I was 18 and still alive. So like most kids who find themselves alive at 18, I went to college. I didn't die stuffing 300mg of prescription speed up my nose for three months, eating two blister packs of cold medicine, or doing full funnels of blackberry brandy. But I did find myself on thin ice during the first freeze of a New Hampshire October. Four years later, you'll be happy to know that I graduated college, and fuck that ouja board. I was STILL alive.

2004. 23 years of age and ready to take the world by its, I don't know, hand? Not its balls at all. Maybe by its forefinger. Like a toddler shakes hands, I tumbled into shift work, temp jobs, and fifths of brown liquor. Busted 8 balls had me ghostbusting the carpet. One contact lens, stumbling walks in Sunderland.

The highlights : falling in love with a Jersey girl, and pissing on a cop outside the Elm Street Tavern.

2006. Started to account some of the damage in this domain. Look it up. I was still alive and living in the bEAST. Sean, Jay and a rottweiler named Jade saved me when a liter of Jim Beam pushed a TV and a cable box on top of me when I did nothing but try and take my pants off. I sold shit door to door, and bilked the residents of Hartford's fine Albany Avenue out of their welfare checks. Drank my breakfast daily with a salt and pepper superhero salesman from Manchester, UK, and burned out on bourbon whisky and broken promises, briskly did a runner down south to America's phallus. When I got there and found a fedora, threadbare shirt, and the game of tennis, I was remarkably still alive.

2010. 29 years of age and back on Cape. In April I found Whitney. Two years into new job on the water with the love of my life bubbling on my arm, I found the streets paved with opiates. Two bulging discs in my back after losing a game of chicken with a blue hued Saturn sedan, a sympathetic doctor who moved here from Florida turned relief into repast, and help to hindrance.

The winter: laid off, strung out, in love, still alive.

2012. Early fall I turned 31, and two weeks later a cunt named cancer killed my mom. I peaked into the tunnel of life's regression and saw the span of two weeks turn my mother from just that into a raving psycho and subsequently to a vegetable on a life vine of morphine. Bedpans, bedsores and RNs with degrees in mollification. I arrived at her death bed achingly clean to find her room the same way. I took a sabbatical from any attempted sobriety until now.


The ouja lied, planes didn't crush me cause computers can tell the difference between 1999 and 1000, even the Mayans fucked me. My moms last words were, "You don't know what your up against." I figured once again on the eve of 122112, that this was it. Nope. I'll make a go of it with the woman and dog I love. I'll plan for sobriety whilst preparing for life......

While being proud that I made it out of this 40 alive.

Very rarely may an amalgam of South Shore detritus be welded well. Normally the sparks splaying about the workshop peter out. Very rarely do they conjure the conflagration that has become stoked so strongly in a being whose main fire's stasis is a smoldering wet log, that sighs and hisses in the damp fire pit of a sober September.

A scepter wielded by the sorcerer of grief, great swaths ripped by the swats of deftly maincured talons gape your armour. We all have our own images sharpened into a sickle of a personal reaper. Draped in robes or garbed in a tailored suit, a bare skull or a perfect mustache creeps in crepuscular nonchalance. A date rape predator or a guardrail without rumble strips. I grumble and sip and wonder and wish.

Death rattles and ample doses, repositioning preventing soars of a certain unobtainable scab. Seemingly normal questions poised provoke answers obsequious. One jigger of orange juice from concentrate to every protracted absence, and a visit to the nurses station to elicit a joke that jostled normalcy.

Once upon time a verdant August begged from his neighbor, natures equivalent of a cup of sugar. What he got in return were two packets of Splenda and an apology for the dearth.

They chorused the notion that there was no time to prepare, even though an abundance was a normalcy, and, while apologies showered from random places like a rainbow from a broken garden hose, I prepared to quaff my coffee black whilst imploring myself to never enjoy the taste.

So I'd see it I am sure, one night if it stacked up like milk crates; so glaringly obvious only a person mired in the middle might miss it. Slight tares ripping so gapingly, so apparent.
The zoo keepers know when the glass is cracked and the bars are bent. They know before the animals. If the animals knew of course they'd run and eschew their placards. Domesticated and cussing while galloping to their freedom, letting their colors fly like a flag from a freshly conquered keep.
Deep scratches in the paint job are buffed out by the constant companionship, they become glassed over by the humdrum and clear coated over by our favorite world complacency. Shallow surfaced annoyances stand first place on the podium while those who show and place duck the sickle of familiarity with feigned indifference. Some sentences are commuted whilst others just sound good.
Hoping the last one was the latter, the facade dulls and the trim falls off. Neglected shutters on a cottage of humdrum, peeling paint on a cupola of coexistence. Weathervanes of various breezes denoting headwinds from dangerous directions; the sea and tide stacking up, while the whitecaps surf the question. While the answers rollick in the trough, keeling on the truth, one can ascertain dissension.
, Even if shes broken on the shore, We'll be still clinging to the stanchion.

It was here that I was
waylaid by the stagnancy of the humdrum, sitting on
this stool
gutshot and then some. Then some
tinnitus of a long ago
bender began
ringing in my head like some hipster with his Iphone
on the old phone.
A dead one at that,
ringer: I am a dead ringer for the guy that had a good time, but now I despise one.
A disguise from long ago, donning
my party hat nowadays is tantamount
to drinking a beer in the shower
and living dangerously is drinking that beer from a glass bottle. Half throttle,
then full power pulling me down
like a three year old
reaching for a box of Cookie Crisp.
Hucking nips,
out the window on the drive home from another shift
and at the crux of it, I am loving it.
I rarely write now that I am happy. I have my irksome peccadilloes all the same, but with a lady in your life they become compartmentalized. Switch persons in the same sentence that I had commuted when I wrote the Inklinks, which are gone now. It really is all the same. This is a blog. blah blog.

All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer. All happiness, and no complaints make Dave a dull writer.