Beware of grief

I take a break from my impressive wine habit before the year turns. I look tired enough without being mildly hung-over.

I feel better physically. But it took me away from the inside of myself, which may be the reason for the habit in the first place, like a psychomotor Droste effect. When you break the cycle, you're left with what's behind it, typically grief or something like it.

Grief or something like it does not take "no" for an answer. You can't just say, "No, I'm not having this grief. I'll distract myself. I'll focus on work. I'll rave in Ibiza. I'll eat this chicken pot pie and watch 'Spongebob.'"

Fine.

Grief will wait, like a cougar, watching its prey get fatter and fatter. The longer you wait to let it take you down—and it will—the longer it will chew through you.

Grief comes in waves. It physically hits the body like a wall of water. It leaves you like a cartoon coyote flattened by a giant steam roller. You sort of unstick your flat self from the ground and try slowly to get 3D again. It's hard to breathe when you're 2D because your lungs are flat. That's how you know it just happened.

I can see why people don't give up wine habits alone, but the handful of people who understand me are farflung and occupied. And I don't do confessionals except for ones like this, where I can say whatever I want without someone interrupting to tell me what I'm trying to say or what's wrong with me.

So I sit alone in a cloister with this stuff that's stuck keeps fucking me up and say, "Fine. Here I am. What the hell do you want?" And then wait, because of course it can't be like a round of antibiotics and a two-day nap. It's more like Cato Fong dropping from the ceiling when everything's almost perfect inside of you.

There are other things to do in the cloister. Push-ups. Art. Any kind of art. Anything the body considers art. The mind has to stay out of it and let art take place. Which is why I am not too concerned about sentence structure here. A small rebellion of the consciously dying.

Art is in my lineage. My mother and her friends spray painted six-pack rings Kleenex pink and blue and twisted them into hyacinth blooms for table centerpieces. I don't know what your mom and her friends did. Mine did that. I find it to be not merely perfectly legitimate "art," but Renaissance-like Americana that will one day adorn a plaster half-pillar in the National Art Gallery. I say this in all seriousness because I saw a perfectly pressed men's dress shirt pinned to a wall in the National Art Gallery as part of an "installation."

I have ironed, and I have dealt with plastic six-pack rings. Ducks get caught in them. I know, because I freed one once from a six-pack ring. With another guy I had a crush on that makes me wonder if I hit my head. That's not to be as un-nice as it sounds, because he was a perfectly nice drug dealer who was shorter than me but drove a nice car. And I think he had a pet snake.

See, I told you.