Texans don't all have drawls--I thought I knew that

Waking to the vibrating hum of my cell phone alarm and a feeling of dread is fast becoming routine. Despair does not make a good breakfast item, although it is even worse as a late-night snack.

I had lunch w/ TF at Café Gratitude, and we commisserated, both veterans on the field of worry. As worriers (introverted extroverts, extroverted introverts), we put on a brave face for the world but carry our worries heavy in our hearts and on our minds and they simply will not go away, no matter how nicely or often we ask.

Later in the day, swinging on the faded green hammock on my westward facing balcony in the afternoon sun (it gets only afternoon sun), I realized I don't believe in hell enough not to commit suicide.

But if it is real, and the belief system to which I subscribe tells me that it is, this sun-drenched hell of mine is really no hell at all compared to the real thing. How luxurious is this life we lead that even the poorest among us have breath. It scares me that I contemplate suicide with cool lucidity and not the harried anxiety and uncontrollable emotional floodgate impulses of yesteryear. This desire for death is calm, lucid, clear, the way I imagine absinthe is in comparison with "normal" alcohol. It is lucid inebriation, a floating along, flooded not by a desire for death but a cessation of life--they are not the same thing.

I felt the familiar void, which I attempt to fill with people, food, TV, alcohol, parties, and lovers. I succumbed to the allure of drunken bliss, the better to avoid the incessant headache-anxiety and the calm reflection on the liberation that is suicide.

At the Time Travel party at Afro, I met two Texans. I was drunk. I said, "I'm surprised you don't have a drawl."

The better-looking one looked offended, and said roughly, "We're from [here, he said San Antonio, or Houston, or Dallas]. We're town folk. We don't have accents."

At this point, the conversation, if it had been a conversation at all, might have ended, but I can't recall.

And I suppose that was the point of the night, that I don't remember much of it, or any of it particularly clearly, and this is good.