Death Knell of a Sharpie

It was about 5 in the morning and everyone had shimmied off to bed. Either due to being exhausted, or being offended by my inaudible knackered rants. I stayed up pouring myself drinks and working furiously to polish off the bottle of 151. At some point, sitting there by myself in the wee hours of the morning, I became conscious of the fact that I was entering the point of no return. I was now in that fuzzy area, drifting swiftly to that point where memory is worthless. I had drank enough that I would likely not remember anything, especially if I continued at my current pace. In this realization I was inspired to attempt an experiment. And so I began writing notes in the hope that they would remind me the next morning of what strange thoughts were going through my mind this early Sunday morning.

Standing out on that cold deck overlooking the back yard. The fog had descended making it seem like the entire world consisted only of this tiny little patch of land, and to march beyond that opaque boundary you would most certainly take an infinite dive from the edge of my tiny little Bacardi induced utopia. And there I sat for a time, with the entire world asleep and only the hazy glow of lights off in the distance to keep me company. And one of those lights spoke to me. Told me secrets that I was not meant to know. And at some point, evidently, I became convinced that my ultimate purpose in this world had been revealed to me. My one true purpose. My singular divine purpose. I ran to my pad of paper and furiously jotted it down. This much i remembered, although vaguely.

Over the course of the next 2 hours, and the rest of the bottle of Bacardi, I emptied the entirety of a sharpie marker onto some 30 pages of typing paper recording every nuance of this image in my mind. Despite my state, there was perfect clarity...


It was simple, and elegant, and obtainable. My path was laid out for me in its entirety and it all made perfect sense. If there is such a thing as divine intervention, it could not be far from what I was experiencing.

But I was in that place of darkness; I had crossed the point of hazy recollection and partial recall long ago. I knew that if I did not record this thing, in all of its vivid inspirational detail…it would be lost. Because my memory, in its current state, could not sustain it.

I labored over it…and eventually I finished, as the sun was peeking its rays through the trees and the fog was lifting. And for a few minutes I sat there. With a dead sharpie marker, an aching wrist, 30 pages of what I believed could possibly be pure brilliance, and the knowledge that the next day I would awake and be completely surprised at this strange letter sitting next to me in my own handwriting. I must have folded up these pages gently. And with the sharpies death gasp I scrawled on the back of the folded memoir… “Hope you got some sleep old boy…good morning…now take the time to read this”

*************

I woke up the next morning, in great pain. Dehydrated, feeling like my head had been plucked from a dog’s ass. Hating my existence. And I rolled over, and sitting next to me when was a tiny stack of typing paper folded in half…with the words “Hope you got some sleep old boy…good morning…now take the time to read this” written on top of it. And though I wrote them earlier that morning, my eyes were now seeing them for the first time.

And somehow…through the fog of my hangover…I thought…“My god. I think last night I may have discovered something very important about myself.” And so I jumped out of bed and furiously opened my midnight memoirs...excited to see what deep, mysterious, insight into my psyche I had unraveled.

And I discovered that my last act, before giving into my exhaustion and making my way to the couch, must have been spilling my drink directly onto the stack of papers.

For all that remained of “my purpose on this earth” was 30 pages of smeared, indiscernible sharpy ink that smelled like Bacardi 151.