Status Updates From McGlue

Above the altar a wooden man hung magically bleeding, his head bowed and face hurt but not unhappy. That was God, they told me. But I knew that wasn't God. I had the feeling, like alone on the road at night, that there was something watching me, something waiting for me to falter, something just hidden in the shadows waiting to pounce. That was God.

But I should say that my vision of a drink is less potion than pain as I see it these days. I'd rather not think of it at all. Something has altered beneath the few still live wires on the surface of my brain. I am beginning to be thirsty for something more. I can barely explain it. And I feel I don't know anything. I never did, as a kid or a man, nothing. I always refused to learn.

"Right," I said, but it didn't feel very right. I didn't want to make it. I wanted to lie down with it and strangle it and kill it and save it and nurse it and kill it again and I wanted to go and forget where I was going and I wanted to change my name and forget my face and I wanted to drink and get my head ruined but I certainly hadn't thought about making it.

I can’t keep reading it.

Swashbuckling scared