Who Still Drinks in This Bar

I've been lost in the stagnate air of Orlando (how much longer can this city go on pretending it's still an orange grove?), and I've been disjointed as I try to piece together which room I'm in and which room I've burned down. So I'm sorry, you 3 people who check this sinking ship.

But I'm back. Tougher and stronger. I have no time for running backwards, and I have no place to go but towards the heart of the matter. You may ask, how could a writer with a blog about their everyday thoughts and musings not post anything for over two months? The answer, I had no thoughts for two months. It was a void, a scrambling lost time of nothing. A confusion of reality, and a symbol of what can happen when the mind leaves and the body retains. But we've bitten the edges and now the fat is in the fire.

Here's a short story I wrote this week. Two things; one, I hate writing in first person, and I think as a writer it's a complete cop out, and two, expect at least a post a week out of me from now on. There's no time for hesitation and there's no room for desperation.

Salvation

I can feel their eyes searching desperately for structure in a game made for fools. They always look the same to me, an odd herd of the elderly and the depraved. Scratching for the luck that fails to find their daily lives and pissing themselves at the prospect of another spin, another fleeting glimpse of false hope, another step closer to the death they can't help but spiral toward.

And I'll give it to them. The boat has been rocking hard tonight in the grasp of a boiling and angry sea. It's as if the ocean can feel the sin bouncing along blindly on its incredible surface. I've been working out here, spinning this wheel three miles out in the ocean, for a little over a decade now. And I've seen them all lose; the desperate school teacher, the politician, a lucky hooker, your mother.

But my time is fleeting, just like that worn and weighted ball that spins in the Devil's circle in front of me. They don't know it yet but there's no doubt that I do, and when He tells me to spin this wheel for the last time I will. And that may just be tonight, because the cliental seem just sinful enough and the stars just strong enough. I can taste the want of salvation in the vodka laced breath of the drunken man now standing before me.

"47 black you dumb cocksucker."

I nod grimly and spin it for him, and I suppose his soul deserves at least that much out of me.

But I think he deserves much more, and I think tonight may be the night I finally give it to him. I was told that it wouldn't be easy or understood, at least at first, but I can feel the sweat building around the tightly coiled sticks of Russian dynamite surrounding my ankles, and I know the hardest part is over. The wire that runs up my leg, over my rib-cage and across my shoulders to a small detonator in my palm, reminds me of the vicious snake in Genesis. It serves a similar purpose at least. And I'll spin the wheel for this heathen, I'll watch as it shimmers from red to black, and I know all the while that it will land on black.