There's no consumption like the kind that comes from having no understanding of mortality. The kind of consumption buried in the moment under layers of immortality too dense for reality to penetrate. The kind of drunk you read about.

Every good binge drunk starts with no assumption of the natural end of things, no assumptions that the world will slide on an axis bent to the wobbly legs of some poor god's pub table. There's no concept of regret in the mind of the person who is so hell bent on consuming their life, their love, their anger their joy their problems their very breath. No regard for fragility, a lack of care that edges on suicidal. Regret is maybe so well lived in that, like a comfy jacket, it just sits on the shoulders and pours off the arms and makes no attempt at momentum. It's just this idea, a comfortable weight. Just this thing, as nebulous as the streetlights in a fog of cigarette smoke and dry air.

So you enter into it. That cavern of myopic too sweet confection, that depth of craving and carelessness that surrounds every sense and at some point you recognize you've already drowned.

You're better off dead. But for some reason you keep consuming.

Like some biological imperative disconnected from your conscious capability.

You lose yourself in a slowly rising wave of warm.

And you see yourself maybe. Maybe if you're lucky you see yourself as you present yourself. The neon sign of You burning through the fog of illiterate costuming. You see you, you see? And maybe, just maybe you recognize in that brief glimpse your fathers and grandfathers and the whole of the world, weighing.

You see captured a sneer of human frailty, the bared teeth of an animal in a trap. You see it? Captured in glass or a puddle or your own waste?

Got it in your mind? Good.

At sixteen, too young to know better, banging frajos one after the next with little perception, mouth numb with cheap beer and even cheaper Canadian whiskey, night sky stumbling on the horizon unbalanced and poorly rendered, one eye closed against the cool summer air. Stumbling with your troops, engaging, speaking with a clarity and bombast that leaves even the detractors speechless wandering what next, you stumble into open air from the garage of a friend, you stumble from air thick with bad hip hop and the smell of burnt tortillas embedded in the walls, that smokey corn oil smell, and you stare at the sky framed by desert and a basketball hoop with no net, and you think to yourself, self?

This is probably as good as it'll ever be.

And you move with that shipleg sailor quality into a too-quiet 2am street with your paramour at your side, a youth of fourteen who is as smashed as you and who is gendered like you, and the two of you trace glowing cigarette ends into the desert, that sweetly dark space, sand brighter than it should be at this hour with the stars doing their thing and the moon half full. Solo cup with half a load of poison, the two of you stumble, catch one another, move quietly giggling into the depths of all of it, the tension visible, shimmering, alcohol waves blurring consequence.

A string of lights on the horizon. Laughter amplified by the megaphone of a garage a few hundred yards away. Eyes wet with alcohol and smoke. The world expands.

You consume without care, the two of you. There is no tomorrow. Not for decades.