The pitch

I recently tried to spend some time thinking about the adverse effects of drinking a pint of whiskey every night of your life especially with respect to detrimental impacts on your intellect, but my mind couldn't function quite right because it was fogged up pretty darn hard for some odd reason I couldn't seem to decipher. So I stepped outside and into the yard, and I stood there in the middle of the cold and the gray staring at the side of the garage for a while to see if I'd find anything interesting to set my tired eyes on. Here is a picture of something interesting that I didn't see on, or in, or in between the lines of sad old cracked-up vinyl siding that day:

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Mountains a thousand miles away, unseen but felt and heard distinctly. Muir might have answered their call were he still around to do so, but I could not for I smelled a trap at hand when I heard those ancient voices in my head.

Trapped in the flatlands.

The ups and downs had long since worn themselves over and out. One day I awoke and found to my amazement that I'd misplaced the entire state of Colorado. Somehow I'd completely lost it.

It's lost. All sight of any sense of narrative in this collection of sentences I'm stringing together in my hazy brain and flinging at the page hoping to obtain some kind of takeaway worth taking away to help make tomorrow a better day, is lost. If there's a lesson here to get, I don't get it.

Lesson number one: This is the wrong way to tell a story. Oh yes, that's correct, it's story time alright!

Since every timeless tale needs great characters, let me begin by acquainting you with a man who loves his whiskey and a woman who would gladly love the whiskey-loving man if the man would just commit to giving up the whiskey for her. The man longs for love but doesn't know how to cope sober. There's a determined yet somewhat desperate chase for rehabilitation and redemption, threatened of course by the constant underlying menace of mental breakdowns and addicted indecision. A couple lovably troublesome kids and probably a dog, plus a good dose of crushing debt and plenty less cash than the collectors are asking for. Like the roads in Colorado there are lots of ups and downs along the way. A fairly stable balance in the battle between happy progress and devastating setbacks both at home and in the workplace, and a very fine line between fully functional and about as close to flatlining as you can get. Despite its monstrous plot this story is actually of the honest and promising sort, passed down as it has been and will be from generation to generation, told and re-told till at last it dies when the festering fury of the universe fails for the final time to contain itself and falls unrestrained against the earth to consume the human race in raging flames—long after you and I are gone of course—so I think you'll agree it seems pretty clear that this thing'll pretty well write itself.

Oh and also, minor plot twist at the end of act two: The narrator's sense of humor is demented, you see, twisted beyond repair. You can't fix something that's so ferociously unfunny as what's on this guy's mind. The whiskey is almost gone, the woman's name is suicide—and the man must make a choice.

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⛰ 🥃 🎉

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_{1-17-22. Images are mine.}