I am getting drunk and writing, forgive me.

[expatriot]

Now here I am, the onset of September 2004, into the twilight of my twenty-seventh year and I am down and out to a degree in Yuma, Arizona. Plagued by this phenomona I less than affectionally label 'perpetual adolescence, I am torn across the channels of my desperate, flailing life.

I am stuck and tossed this way and that, I ponder the great things and then I am suckled by the domestic and obliged to the world of the living although my loyalties lie with the deep pit of the dead. Outside this aluminum coffin a heavy blistering heat weighs heavy on the human soul -- Christian & infidel the same. I am an infant whose comforts depend upon the grace of this electric oasis, this prolonged nursery which allows me to dawdle in my delusions of postponed reckoning; the reckoning long delayed. .

I scrounge up some alcohol and pay old visits to older haunts. Familiar haunts that soothe the pain and this dorm room of the soul, dark, dank sanctuary from the harsh razor wire of fathers I sit in fellowship with the tyrants I otherwise, in more sober times, gnash my teeth at. What luxery do I pretend to exercise by which I pay this treasonous company! To the streets, a muffled zealot voice cries deep inside somewhere but then the intoxicated nostalgia slowly responds. No, let us rest a while a compare the fairy tales of our youth; the bedtime stories of our mothers.

[expatriot]

1. renting at our own tapestry

To what tabernacle do we pray, we who parade with the garments of selfless concern for the downtrodden and teeming masses upon our broken shores? In the grand architecture of our labyrinth minds surely we are all warrior-priests that are paid in droves of worship bestowed upon us by innumerable adoring workers and their once-again-happy homes.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. Everyone has times like this

but they pass away. Frankly, I've found that the older I get, the more interesting life becomes. I still think back to my youth, sometimes with the wishful thought of "...if only I knew then what I know now..." But then I look to what is happening now...not everything great...the aches and pains of bones, the tedium of work...but there is always hope, and sometimes it comes from knowing that all life is changing. Don't fear Shiva, the God of Destruction; he is also the God of Change, and he dances on the dwarf of ignorance.

[expatriot]

4. bless you

thank you for that

[soothsayer]

3. Sounds like someone is having a Saturn return!

It's your first opportunity for adulthood, according to astrology. (It happens when the planet Saturn returns to the same place in your chart as it was when you were born, which takes somewhere between 27 and 29 years.)

[Elidor]

5. Quick-what color are your eyes!

[expatriot]

6. i'll give you a hint.... i am full of shit