NOT ANYTHING

Sobriety is so awful, and it's so awful in such uncool ways. It's waiting, always waiting, and you're the only magazines to read, you're the unattractive wallpaper pattern, and you're the climate control that displeases and the TV that's loud and the receptionist who won't make eye contact. You're stuck in yourself waiting for nothing, nothing, it really sucks. I mean drinking makes one fat and clownish and more monstrous than usual and ruins one's life but there are far worse things than ruination. Ruination is at least something, and sobriety is nothing, nothing, nothing, every fucking tick-tock moment.

It's a howling absence of pleasure's possibility, an absence that makes the multifarious other absences in one's life sing in sympathy, chiming in until every dog in the neighborhood's barking. Emptinesses, shortfalls, absences, keening like cavities, a cacophony crowding ever into one's attention, the wind whistling through them all. God, one longs for the absence of absences, but of course there are things to be done.

Another moment endured, another minute survived, another hour harrowed, another afternoon undergone, another weekend withstood finding ways to get by, and no reward waiting, nothing waiting but nothing, more of it, a fucking wall of it falling over you every second, burying you again and again, and you're clawing through your life like it's quicksand, but it's not-- it's not anything.


...Fortunately, one can sometimes find solace in a good book. The Iron Rail is open every day from 1 to 7 p.m.