When it comes to alcohol I notice myself sadly slipping into a state of weaklinghood; these days I put up about as much resistance to it as Gerhard Schröder’s mouth does to anything emerging from an open zipper if there’s cash to be had. Last night, several hours after a couple bottles of Belgian Tripel ale and three or four glasses of pinot noir (it was a housewarming party, hence wine) I was laying on my bed with the sensation of some terrible straight-sided, sharp-cornered object crystallizing in my brain. I suppose drinking for me is probably going the same way as any other hobby that has become routine and tiresome, like marriage or Wiffle bat beatings. And if I don’t feel that way about drinking, my body is bypassing debate in the upper legislative chamber of my brain and revolting directly.

Maybe it has a point, since I’m starting to doubt my mind in general. A few years ago I started remembering my dreams much more vividly than before, if not always the complex prowlings of my mind within them at least the general atmosphere. I often find them disturbing, not generally for what transpires as much as, for example, the fact that the dominant impression is almost always of the light, an eerie subterranean glow that has never mixed with light of day, the light I imagine illuminating No Exit. But what right have I to feel more at home awake than in my dreams, when dreams are the mind’s own fire, while it is the waking world which is the outside Other? But so it is, and I feel that dreams mark the progress and continual failure of the mind to replicate the beauty of the outside world. I’m like an insecure immigrant, continually convinced of and embarrassed by the superiority of my surroundings to the homeland in my mind.