I bought more rum and more pineapple juice tonight. My hands were shaking earlier today after taking a hot shower. Things look bleak for my liver. I am attempting to wean off the alcohol for a bit, but those attempts are looking to be tossed in the bin along with "Quit smoking", "Take care of yourself" and other half-assed attempts at social civility.

I can control my liquor still, which is apparently a good thing. I have hangups like everyone else, my idiosyncracies and neuroses are average. I am afraid of commitment but so are a million other people, and they manage to plunge into the world of monogamy eventually. Am I correct? Am I defining deviancy down?

Dorothy gets rides with me after class, and she's been drinking a lot lately. We drink in separate rooms in separate towns. We discuss drinking together; sober, hung over. We drink for different reasons. I drink because I want a drink. She drinks because she's a romantic, heartbroken and longing. My uncle gave her sage advice tonight, appropriately enough he was drunk.

He told her to stop drinking out of sadness and pull herself up out of a rut. When he was speaking to her, it was as if he was speaking to all three of us in the car. I nodded my head, agreeing to it all. Not making any attempts to alter it.

Raymond Carver said (paraphrasing) that nothing he ever wrote while drunk was worth a penny. Well, I suppose he's right. But I don't care.

I used to be in love with the world, but everyone is when they haven't experienced it, romanticized about it. Everyone worries themselves with heartache until they realize they need to find something to eat. People like to think the world is cruel, but it isn't. It's just there. It's just breathing, trees just emitting oxygen, cows just shitting manure. It is only as cruel as we make it to be. But the world is funny, and when it truly is funny it never means to be.

I still want to make the world a better place, but my plan of attack is different. I no longer look wide-eyed and alive at the prospects. I take things one step at a time, one drink at a time, one smoke at a time. I smile when I should. I make sure everyone around me is comfortable. I'm still in love with the world, but I'm not stupid anymore.

It's like how I never went to McDonald's back home. Over here, I go and it's my sanctuary of sorts. I sit there and eat something familiar. I won't deny it tastes good. I won't deny I hate myself after eating there, but it's something familiar. Familiarity breeds contempt as so many people are apt to say.

I find myself looking at girls with less tact. I know now why old dirty men are old dirty men. They have lived enough to know it doesn't matter if they are perceived as such. Because they will rot in their graves just like every other person making sure their hands are clean.

There is no choice but to be. But to be.

Oh, but to be. What a wonderful, twisted thing it is. To figure out things and alter them to fit your goal. To love and lose, to lose and lie down, to win and exalt. And that's when everything will be worth it. It's like why we like our heroes to be self-deprecating and aloof, but they have to be semi-attractive otherwise it's pathetic.

I see Dorothy and I don't want to sleep with her, I want to take care of her and I want to find her a proper man who will treat her right but it's slim pickings. I don't believe in much anymore but I believe in myself and I believe I will right this ship. I believe in that baby I was making faces with in the airplane. He will not be special, but he will be alright. We strive for greatness when all greatness happens to be is to be conscious of everyone and everything around you. To make decisions based on that, along with yourself. Sacrifice isn't martyrdom and selfishness isn't always reasonable. Greatness is left to those who are conscious, and it doesn't matter if you're MLK Jr. or a NY fireman in September of 2001. It doesn't matter if you're a kid who offers their dessert to their classmate who accidentally spilled theirs. What matters isn't who knows it. What matters is that you know it, that you sacrifice that.

I want to hug everybody hurting, but I don't want TB. This is the my plight, it's nothing special or worthy of a hero's journey. It's me fucking drunk typing up a storm, preparing for an Armageddon that will never happen. It occurs everytime I wake up.