The Famed Tippler Spills Himself Another Soliloquy (Barroom Boys, Act III, Sc. ii)

It’s like I’ve got diarrhea of the soul. Everything just keeps flushing out of me. I can’t control it. It as an almost completely unintelligible maundering, an effluvia of rambling like pocket lint or grime under the nails. It as an intimating at nothing besides emptiness. It comes to define me. It is more than what I am. Sometimes, when the weather is pluvial and the wind howls like rocket ships, I feel as if I am living on a movie set, that I am never quite alone enough, and the night comes on brandishing my nightmares like objects devoid of meaning or purpose. Stratification would be a solution. Fletching arrows to slings. Far away out-of-tune trumpetings of surrender. Gobbling Almond Joys in the backseat of a car as fishbone clouds shoot by out of the sky’s smoky black belly. Terpsichorean joy, spinning, even over fault lines, flat-footed waltzes, pulling the tiny rusted metal handle from a drawer’s escutcheon, falling for somebody’s deceptive ways, clipping toenails, putting on socks, boiling water, deep sea fishing…a firm grip, groping lost…always people ambulating by outside on cue, cutting hair, signing checks, balancing with the toes on a curb like a benighted out-of-work funambulist. The leaves rot and fall away, are disposed of, sun-burnt offerings to the sidewalk’s uncaring whims. Garbage bags hefted over the shoulder. Juniper trees and catspaw having staring matches that last until the sun goes down. More susurrations crawl through the night, pawing their way through thick tenebrous clouds, uncannily mowing down unsuspecting motorists who are caught underneath the umbrella of their days, immense trash-can-emptying days. The sky turns eccyhmotic in a sudden flash as the xanthic light sneaks away behind lucent glowing mountaintops, which could probably be described as majestic. Dust motes can be feverishly counted, the geometry of their swirling paths is differential and could be described quite easily by somebody like Bernhard Riemann. I was hitting a buck fifty in Double-A ball when I found out that the Coefficient of Restitution of a baseball with 126 red stitches is .5, and that’s when I decided to become a carpenter. The lighting in the small room was what you would call ambient. It had a lambency to it, a type of lilting effulgence which soaked everything in amber, a rich fulvous casting of strange shadows that infused even people’s faces with a kind of deep melancholic hue. My soul feels all used up, gone into desuetude, locked from the inside, hibernating. Nobody is keeping an eye on me. The shades are all pulled down to keep the light out. Say hello to the little children for me.