Written on coasters, drunk at the bar...

The following was discovered written on coasters scattered on the floor amid a pile of broken bottles and dirty socks:

He was constricted to writing on coasters. He'd forgotten his journal, but at least he had his pen and his wits about him. So he wrote while sitting in the bar sipping his whiskey, afraid he would discover himself written down, captured in ink, unable, or unwilling to fight himself free. He could not escape the fetal stirrings of the Novel growing: an abort, fail, retry repeating itself in his head. The Novel would not limit itself to free-verse thought expressions. It went with him wherever he went. As long as he had his trusty writing instrument, which was stolen, and perhaps, beside the point, the finest pen he had ever owned, he wouldn't be able to escape.

And so the Novel continued in vaporous circles, churning in his brain as the smoke from his cigarette commingled with the air, dancing in tandem with laws of physics he could not fathom. His thoughts resembled certain books written in sand and purchased in dreams he desperately desired to own. He saw It swirling into fantastic hedonisms, Grendhalian gardens filled with sin and his greed, along with the Words, floated half-formed, as yet unborn in the sterile hollows of his mind. So, he sat and waited in the dark confines of the bar for a character to walk onto the stage, not needing to create them, but draw them up in the bucket of his pen. He waited. He watched. He listened. He drank.

"Oh, my God!" exclaimed a one-line, bit actor. He realized he could make of their comment what he wanted, choosing whether to foreshadow their declaration, lend it an air of prophetic import. Instead, he let it slide into the general background noise of the bar. Waited for something else. Drank.

It had been here where he had felt the pull of flesh and pen, mixed with alcohol, so many lives expounding the utter emptiness of their being. Here, where Life became nothing more than fetid desires and putrid purchases of souls traded for fleeting, empty rituals; here, he had felt most alive. Yet, it was here also he felt, and beared witness to the secret fear of mediocrity, the drab illusions draping his mind that he could not escape from.

And so, it was here, amid the scattered laughter and drunken conversations of two-dimensional non-entities on the periphery of his consciousness that he felt at home, anonymous. And it was here he returned day after day to witness the same tired visage from which he gazed upon the world. Here, he turned the mirrored eye back upon itself and let it look, for once, on something other than the self.

Another hack actor in his life proclaimed in proud insolence: "I've sucked dick for Jägermeister!" Good for him. I guess it gives meaning to his emptiness, but my own? What gives meaning to the emptiness inside me? How do you translate the utter despair, the nihilism, the wretched horror of the world into words? Your own and no one else's? Not some apt quote from some drunken fool now dead and famous; caught in the glare of envious, empty minds incapable of original thought. Not that.

Suddenly, he realized he was between worlds, between sobriety and the breaking point. He was at the point where the mind, no longer capable of holding itself and the liquor together, became stranded on an island of drunkenness and despair. He felt his mind giving up the ghost. He came to the point where the mind stops expounding the fabulous fictions we make of our lives. He decided he would not fabricate dialogue, never name characters after fruit, or turn the people he knew into truths. He would make of this life, and the next one, a play, a staging ground for his seasonal migration to hell.

He suddenly realized he didn't care any more. The cadence of his thoughts slurred and became a cross-eyed hackneyed drawl. He saw the words pouring out of his pen, knew they digressed from the words in his heart, but had no control over their existence. They existed, as Plato's forms had, in some supra reality, divorced from the truth, which had slowly become fiction.

...

He found himself, after many lost thoughts and actions, after the blurred moments of drunken stumbling, here, wide-eyed and wondering just how it was he had come to this place. Had he..? he wondered momentarily, before asking another question he had no answer for. What had happened? Where had he been? What had he done? sped through his impaired mind like wildfire, catching up snippets and fragments of thoughts and conversations. He couldn't remember whether he had simply thought those things, or quite possibly, done them. What had he done, he asked himself again; knowing, and fearing the answers.