It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 86: Chapter IX

Coarse and Offensive Language. Reader Discretion Advised.

If there is pleasure to be found in tragedy, it is the pleasure of knowing that tragedy does not last. No matter what may come, no matter the erratic behavior of your supposed society, your family, your friends, yourselves, nothing will make sense, nothing will matter, truly matter. So it is that in this everything comes to an equilibrium. A balance! And what is balance? Nothing more than nature's way of saying, 'take comfort! Breath deep and easily. Everything evens out in the end.

It doesn't matter!

Everything is fine!'

The things that make us sing, the things that make us cry, are nothing more than momentary lapses in an otherwise mundane existence. Happy endings and calamitous finales are only for those few affected. And let us be perfectly honest with each other, dear readers! We hate them in equal measure, those lucky people to be afflicted or blessed! Happy people are just people in denial, and tragic people are just us, but somehow more deserving of misery. For every one there is another, and if you step back from the world for a moment, if you can bare to leave your paltry problems behind, you will see the truth. Those outliers are just poles on the ever-rounding circle. They are no more important than any other point. They are just those who have tried to make a difference or tasted luck. Everything at close inspection is cynically cyclical. What goes around, comes around, and starts right back up again. The happy will one day be sad and vice versa. So why even bother?

Yes, thought Alan Carr, why should I even fucking bother? Why do I even care?

And then came the answer, one which he gladly voiced aloud to the cold, December air. 'Fuck it! I don't care! I won't care!'

Alan Ignatius Carr was feeling just a bit put out that night. More so than usual. In three days, it would be Christmas, the happiest of holy days in the Christian calendar, except in St. Gregory's where the day was best compared to any other rainy Tuesday in March, only on Christmas one felt obliged to be with family.

'Families,' Alan grunted, slipping on the icy cement outside of the bar and falling into the stout lamppost with the flickering light. Two lampposts actually—three, now that he looked more carefully!

No...no...there was just one if he focused hard enough.

Focus...it was so hard to come by in those days. 

How much had he drank?

He couldn't remember.

No more than the night before, and no less than he would tomorrow, and tomorrow, and probably tomorrow after that.

It helps, he believed, to drink.

'Yeah,' he told the lamppost(s). 'It cures what fuckin' ails you, don't you know?'

By his reckoning, when people see you drink to excess, they tend to avoid conversation. Even better, when you're good and drunk enough, you don't really need company. People are, uniformly, stupid. Wholeheartedly and earnestly stupid, and to drink steadily was to have an excuse not to be overrun with such maudlin vacuousness.

In drink, there was silence! Glorious silence!

That's the way the world should sound, he concluded. Silent!

That's not to say he would have refused to engage with all humanity. If there was one person he would always have time for, it would be, of course, Edward Towne, but the latter had been avoiding him as of late.