THE Wasted Chronicle

Because I'm self centered, selfish, introverted and because I've got nothing else to do I've decided to try a write a book based on the last 9 months of my life. I've started with the last night out I had before I got ill and probably get bored and never pick it up ever again. But here is the opening. Thoughts would be appreciated (if you can conjure any):

I'm sitting outside, it's the middle of April and I've paid five pounds to get into this place. The band hasn't hit the stage yet, so I'm waiting with everyone else in the beer garden for a cigarette, a drink and some conversation. I'm surrounded by people I know but none of them are friends, they should be, I've known most of them for over a year and a half but they're nothing more than faces I'd recognise in the street. I'm already sitting on five bottles of beer and I'm well through my fourth double rum and coke. The beautiful haze that falls over you when you reach that perfect, drunken zenith clouds my eyes like the mists over the peat bogs and I never want to know anything else ever again. For me, this is the Kerouacean Dream, this is "it". I'm drunk and blurry, surrounded by people I could go my whole life never seeing again in a bar I hate and I'm as happy as I'm ever going to get. People talk around me and it washes through me like the wind, I don't care what they talk about, right now my life couldn't be any more simple or pure and as I toke easily on a Camel Light I wish I could stay here forever. But I can't. The bar beckons. 

The place isn't packed yet and the bar is quiet as I go back inside, slump through the dimly lit room to the far end and ask the 20-something barman for another double rum and coke. The owner of the joint is wildly setting up the band and nicking people who have brought in their own booze, I know this because three of the Kronenberg's in his fridge are mine. I start and finish my drink at the bar and watch the room before ordering another one. It's a fairly small place, long and thin, the stage and the exit are at the one end and the bar is at the other. Near me on the right is the door to the toilet and on the right, on the other side of the room is the beer garden. The whole room is painted black and its dark and poorly lit. It's starting to fill up with people now, it won't be long before the band takes the stage. 

Back outside I nestle my way numbly onto a bench crowded by laughter, noise and people and focus all my attention on my drink. People talk but I take no notice of the questions, the small talk or the flirting, it's not going to get me anywhere worthwhile tonight. I'm totally isolated in a world that feels like it was made at my inconvenience. I'm not a martyr nor a hermit, I'm just alone and cold and dead inside. In a minute I'll be back at the bar, falling rapidly away from my perfect state of mind and stumbling blindly into the blackout that greets the end of every evening. It's already starting to slide over me. My mind flashes erratically: I'm watching the band, I'm leaving the bar, I'm walking down an empty road, then a riverside, then a car park, I'm in a car, I'm inside another bar, I'm drinking beer and rum and whiskey, then walking up a hill, then vaguely home. Deaf to my footsteps and blind to my surroundings, I walk a path I have never remembered taking many times.