These chapters don't change name and the action barely changes, but change is coming. Change is inevitable. There is so much content for each moment it is difficult to go to a new idea without spending time completing the last.
A candle burns. A glass of red wine, the sweet bitterness. It tastes faintly of my lover who is far away; separated by distance and by time. I can no longer taste those lips on mine, but I can taste them in the wine. Paine allegedly did his best work tipsy, if not intoxicated. Hemingway was either a drunkard in fact or at least he believed himself to drink heavily through his characters who were rarely apart from a bottle. Is it necessary for all great writers to suffer an addition, of alcohol, drugs, perhaps madness is enough.
Rum as well as brandy were the drinks of the American revolution. The sugar tax was one of many causes of the revolution. Perhaps the major cause was less about freedom and more about fortune. The desire to buy cheaply for the common man, the desire to avoid financial obligations to the empire by the more prosperous, the desire to avoid unnecessary regulation and taxation for the merchant. Well, they all lost their war against tyranny. Taxation without representation is a given in the long freed colonies, at least responsible, answerable representation. We are all effectively enslaved by our government as all rulers eventually corrupt and enslave those unwilling or unable to bear arms against the corrupted. The natural tendency of power to corrupt, the natural tendency of the weak minded to submit. No country is more regulated, what we do, carry, and who we marry, what we ingest, make, buy, grow, even our words are controlled by laws and monitored, the names being changed to protect the writer, there is no innocent to protect in a country where there are too many laws not to break them. And yet, there is still a bit of the virtue left in the system, there is still opportunity to live a virtuous life, to rail against tyranny and to martyr oneself against the weakness and sloth of the masses.
But we were talking about wine. It deadens the pain enough for me to talk about the vacations we failed to take together, the things there are to see in the world, the beds to sleep in together, the hot springs to share as the snow falls and melts in our hair, the idea of getting far enough away from everyone else that we can be naked together until we are too tired to go on and have no choice but to go back to the world of other people. Even there when we are together we are alone, protected by our love which acts like a shield keeping everyone out. My lover and the pain of loss are far in the future. Dispair is in the future.
Now it is only the dead pretending to live. An opportunity comes across a phone call to collect a debt. It isn't the offer of money. It is an offer, from someone run out of town covered at least with metaphorical tar and feathers to engage in a business arrangement. It is a quick thing. Enough for that college tuition, no money actually changes hands. Fortune over virtue, buy low sell high, come see, come see. The Cajun memory, the invitation to live. Something is worth seeing somewhere, "come see" like the words of a children's book.
I do not know how to distrust. It is a disconnect between the two halves of my brain I have come to discover. One side warns the other, but it doesn't hear or it doesn't hear clearly. It is not forced to agree. Come see, the offer is made. The part of the brain yells, "stop fool" but the fool doesn't hear. It is all the amassing of fortune, and why not? There is no love, nothing else. The lover is there, of course, the lover who failed decades earlier to rescue me, but who waits, nonetheless in the future.
Come see.
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