Two Thought Experiments Involving Beer

Beer Experiment #1

Requires: 4-6 beers

Aim: Body awareness.

Begin drinking the beer and avoid going to the bathroom to urinate until you’ve had several. Without rushing your drinking, hold on as long as you possibly can, waiting until your bladder is properly full before visiting the facilities.

Before urinating, consider your bladder and its place in your body. It is, at the moment, a very full bag of liquid. As you begin to urinate, pay attention to the feeling within your abdomen. As the urine leaves and your bladder begins to shrink, try to feel the dropping sensation in your stomach, from your diaphragm down through your guts, caused by your organs sliding down to fill the space as your full bladder empties out.

Repeat with each subsequent urination and try to feel your organs move inside you.

Beer Experiment #2

Requires: 8-12 beers

Aim: Repercussions awareness.


Again, drink beer until it is time to urinate. This time take note of the color of the urine. Typically the first piss will have some yellow color to it. Continue to pay attention to the color of piss during subsequent urinations, keeping in mind the color of the beer you are drinking, be it the watery yellow of an American light, the golden amber of a Canadian lager, or the inscrutable black of an Irish stout.

As you urinate each time, notice that no matter what the color of the beer is, your piss will lose its yellowness until it is indistinguishable from water in color.

Now consider your body. Begin to understand that your body is acting as a filter, skimming everything out of the liquid except the purest thing, the water. Whatever crap is in the beer to make it watery yellow, golden amber or impenetrable black is staying in you, getting thicker, and turning into sludge in your internal pipes and hoses.

Do not think that I am anti-beer. At one point in my life I drank enough beer to get drunk every day, almost without exception, for four years straight, totalling at least one thousand days. Beer and I are one now. I just want you to give it some thought. We fill up and empty out, fill up and empty out. The water goes. But the yellow, gold, or black?

It stays.

Dream Novel Chapter 8

A dream of working...

With a crew unloading boxes from a van at the front door of some building. Unclear what the place is. Without sounding too much like a caveman, it is someplace "fancy."

I am not fancy. I am dirty and sweaty from labor. The boxes are heavy, and the stack of boxes keeps growing. They are piling up on the sidewalk. We're worried we'll have to carry them in one at a time.

I see Steph approaching along the sidewalk.

Like in other recent dreams, she is slightly different. She's taller, more slender, her haircut is a short, tidy pageboy cut, her glasses large and dark-framed. She's wearing a dress of black-and-white stripes with a black cardigan, and carrying a stylish briefcase.

Professional. Business-like.

I call her name when I see her. She looks over out of the corner of her eye and continues, hurrying up the front steps of the building.

I call again and she hurries to avoid me, heading inside. I want to run after her, but I feel held back by my work. Also, her total desire to avoid me is palpable.

She is gone, but later, as we've been going in an out carrying the boxes, I see her in a room at the end of a hall, standing alone. Again I call, this time approaching, but she backs away, and again, she is gone.

Other dream scenes move in, water and horror from below, but this is what stands out: a hurried look out of the corner of the eye.

Dream Novel Chapter 7

A kiss...

A dream before waking, lying in bed, head on the pillow, in our marriage bed, the bed where Steph and I loved and slept for two years. The room was filled with morning light, and in my dream her head is on my shoulder.

But is it her?

It is Steph but not Steph.

There is the familiarity of the partner, but details are changed: Steph wore her hair in light shades of brown or dirty highlighted blond, but this girl, this "Steph figure" has dark -red-brown hair. Red lips. Dark eye shadow. This is just cosmetics, of course.

In the dream I turn my head and we are face to face, and we kiss. It begins tentatively, but we slowly advance, and soon, without moving our bodies we are making out, long exploratory expressions the way we used to make out when we were dating (amazing that that was really just a few years ago).

In dreams we feel emotions: fear, anxiety, anguish, but also excitement and anticipation, joy and happiness. However, we don't feel the physical: a punch we throw does negligible damage, and the punch thrown at us causes no pain. We are aware of things but do not feel them. My dreams are almost purely visual. Even dialogue in my dreams is not heard, even if I know what is said.

The upside of this physical unreality is that a protracted make-out session in the early morning has none of the normal physical inconveniences: long dalliances of tongue-on-tongue kissing are not hampered by the unpleasantness of morning breath. The thick smack-smack mouth seems fresh and ready, and we kiss endlessly, like new lovers.

Until my eyelids flutter and she is gone.

And I am alone in the light of morning.

The days seem so long now. The fact that I work from home makes it worse. I have no specific job to kill the hours of the day with the mindless repetition of rote duty. It's worse that I freelance, that I am responsible for generating my own fresh work that becomes my income. It's worse that grief has cause total spiritual rot, and all creative work is blocked.

So what next? Where do we go from here?

Dream Novel Chapter 6

Woke up several times during the night, each time emerging from dream state. Will try to summarize:

In a forest at night, gravel roads carved out of impenetrable mass of woods,
the trees rising like walls and the starless black sky like an ominous ceiling.

The roads curve back and forth up and down hills
(mountains? impossible to judge the broader lay of the land, for as they say,
one can't see the forest because of all the trees)
there are lights on posts to guide us,
spots cleared out for camping, but this is no park.

But what is this place?

Ominous feelings, walking around in the dark,

as usual, LOOKING FOR SOMEONE.

There is a young woman, no one I've ever seen before, but I'm following her,
always one step behind,
she keeps going down,
down the roads,
down the hills
and it's getting colder like we're going deeper into a cave.

I wake up feeling like I've been in a chase, watching some thriller, trying solve a mystery. I burrow down into the blankets for warmth and go back to sleep.

Soon I'm in a basement, several levels down,
concrete and wood,
there is a hatch that leads deeper down to a network of tunnels and caves,
there is a resuce ongoing,

there are maps unfolded showing longs narrow passages impossibly deep,
many filled with water,

and an old man,
he must be in his seventies,
comes up in a wet suit with breathing apparatus
and a young woman,

he managed to rescue her and bring her back up 
alive but unconscious.

Rescued. Saved.

Again I wake up. It's still dark. More dreams come before morning, but they are fleeting, and their memories do not last through the waking up process.

This is another change in theme. Lately the dreams have been about looking for someone, typically Steph, but now there is the insertion of an actual rescue: is the idea that I need to save Steph? Could this come from guilt that I was not there to save her when she died?

One thing I haven't really dealt with was guilt over her death. I've felt guilty for being alive without her, felt guilty for trying to read a book, guilty for not bothering to read a book, guilty for anything done and not done when she is dead, but I have not felt guilty for not being there to prevent her death.

She died in a crosswalk. Someone hit her. That could have happened any time, and nothing I could do could have prevented it. Letting her walk out the door allows for the possibility of the random.

But is this guilt?

Dream Novel Chapter 5

Up early this morning. Another weird dream. This is getting to be more than a little emotionally taxing. A similar scene to the one where I was hunting around the campus trying to find Steph, only this time the scene has changed to a nightclub. It wasn't a specific place I can remember ever visiting, just a generic dark, crowded space with narrow passageways. The place was a maze. I remember cruising down hallways like tunnels stuffed with people, sometimes catching up with her but she's talking to other people-- she disappears, and then I'm looking for her again, over and over.

I'm not a big fan of dream analysis, but this one seems pretty obvious. Too obvious to write down in a notebook.

I've been talking about these dreams with Allie. She's says it's good that my ability to remember the dreams is improving. She says I'll be able to start influencing dreams soon, she calls it "lucid dreaming," where your dreaming-self realizes that you're in a dream, and you can choose to alter what's happening.

I said that sounds cool, but I didn't tell her that I immediatly thought about using this form of dreaming to track down Dream Steph.

Allie's idea is that I can use dream therapy to resolve the grief, move past it... my plan feels more like wrapping myself up in it forever.

Comeback Road Chapter 11 (2/2)

(This is an excerpt from my novel, Comeback Road. Click to learn more, including how to read the whole thing.)

It's dark and silent where I wake up. Am I in a coffin? I think sooner or later everyone wakes up in a dark strange place and wonders if they were accidentally presumed dead, put into a coffin and buried alive. I stretch out my arms and don't find a lid above me, so I breathe a sigh of relief and start feeling my way around.

I’m lying on a couch. I'm dizzy, but I get up and begin to inch my way across the cement floor. I can see a dim line of light beneath a door and realize I'm in a basement.

I try to walk towards the light but my foot catches on something and I end up crashing over something big, metal and spikey. I can feel my fingers jammed in between little wires. Bicycle spokes? This basement is a death-trap.

Christine must have put me down here. She's the last thing I remember from the show. I remember getting in her car, then nothing. Why the hell would she stick me in her basement? God, maybe she never intended for me to get out of here. Maybe she's upstairs sharpening her knives, knowing I'll never be able to find my way out of this bicycle-filled hell. I drag myself over the pile of bikes, moving towards the door. I catch my clothes in the pedals and get caught on the filthy chains.

I make it over the bikes and crawl on my hands and knees toward the light, finally finding the bottom of the stairs. As I reach the door I hear muffled music and laughter from elsewhere in the house. Christine must have other lunatics with her, preparing to sacrifice me to their pagan god. Hopefully they are putting on leather and vinyl bondage gear to perform their cruel acts. Somehow being disemboweled by insane groupies would be easier to take if they were sexily dressed.

I open the door and peak into the kitchen. The place looks dirty and poorly maintained. I look at the clock on the stove. It's four o'clock in the morning. Pizza boxes are stacked on the table. I flip the top one open. It's empty. The bastards.

The voices are coming from the living room. I take a look around the corner and see several young people sitting on the couches and the floor. The table in the middle of the room is stacked with beer bottles and cups.

One guy sees me. “Holy shit!” he screams, throwing beer on the girl next to him. When he screams, all the girls scream, then laugh. They turn around and see me standing there.

I walk into the room. "Okay," I say. "Who are you, and where the hell am I?"

The guy who screamed answers me. "Dude, what happened to your nose? Man, you scared the shit out of me."

"Not my problem, Mary," I tell him. "Blame whoever kidnapped me and stuck me in the basement. One more time, where am I?"

"Christine brought you," says one of the girls on the floor. "We thought you would want to sleep, so we took you to the basement where it's quiet."

"Kidnapping, unlawful confinement," I say. "Where's Christine?"

"Right there," they say, pointing to a girl curled up at the end of the couch. I didn't recognize her because of the hood pulled over her head.

"What is she, passed out? She brings me here and then passes out? Fuck, where's the phone? I've got to get out of here."

"The phone's been disconnected," the girl on the floor says. "Somebody give him a cell."

I get a phone from one of the wasters. I pull the number for Wayne’s cell out of my wallet and call. There’s no answer. I call again and someone picks up. It's Dave, the slightly vacant bass player from Machine Within A Machine.

"Dave. It's Terry."

"Oh, Terry," he says sleepily. "Where are you?"

"At some house. I passed out and some chick kidnapped me. Can someone pick me up?"

"Dude, we're all sleeping. We couldn't find you, so we just went to crash."

"Is Jason there?"

"Yeah, he's sleeping. Everybody's sleeping. We're not gonna come get you now man. You disappeared on us. Deal with it."

"Don't make this out to be my fault. I got hit in the head with a bottle."

"Well, you left with the girl, didn't you? If you want to get laid after the show that's fine, but don't expect us to pick you up in the middle of the night. Call in the morning."

"All right," I say. "Oh, Dave?"

"Yeah?"

"Your band wants to replace you." I snap the phone shut. "Asshole," I mutter. I turn back to the group of drunks.

"Okay kids," I tell them. "I'm here for the night. Is there somewhere besides the dungeon where I can crash?"

At ten o'clock in the morning I call again and get Wayne. He gives the phone to Jason. I explain what happened and tell him the address of the house.

There are young passed out all over the house. I see Christine still sleeping on the couch. I touch her on the shoulder and she takes a deep breath. She slowly blinks her eyes open and looks up at me. "Oh," she says. "Terry. Are you okay?"

"Why the hell did you bring me here?" I ask her.

She rubs her eyes. "You passed out in my car," she says. "I was worried, so I brought you here."

"Why didn't you just go back in the bar and tell my friends?"

"I thought they would be mad," she says with a yawn. "Are you mad?"

"You kidnapped me," I say. "Yes, I'm a little bit mad."

Half and hour later the maroon van The Clutch Dogs rented pulls up in front of the house. It's grey and raining out when I stumble down the front steps and get in the back of the van, slumping next to a pile of drum gear. Jason's driving.

"Hey there, sunshine," he says. "Bang some groupies?"

"No, I got fucking kidnapped," I tell him. "I slept on a pile of rusty bicycles. Fuck, what a way to start a tour."

"Well, you didn't miss much last night, unless you count Mark here making out with some blonde." He punches the Scottish drummer in the shoulder. "Didn't you, Mark? Cheating on poor sweet Sarah, aren't you?"

Mark looks awful, slumping down into the passenger seat. He looks like blended shit shaped into a person. "Aye, ah, I had a wee bit much to drink last night, aye?"

Jason turns around and looks at my face. "That looks awful," he says. "You've got two black eyes. Did you clean that thing this morning?"

"No," I say. "Let's get going. What is it? Four hours to North Bay?"

"Give or take," Jason says. He puts the van in drive and we start moving. "Are you ready for the good news? We sold like, like sixteen discs last night."

"Really?" We brought one hundred copies of a six track disc we made from the tape of our performance at The Strathmore Hotel. The costs of making them went onto my already-stretched credit cards, so I'm desperate to sell copies.

"Yeah," Jason says. "We sold more than Machine did. I think Wayne was pissed."

"How come we outsold them?" I ask. "Did they put on a crappy show?"

"None of them got hit in the face with a bottle," croaks Mark. "We totally upstaged them, mate."

"Hmm. Maybe I should get hit every night."

"Do you know what was weird this morning?" Jason says. "I think the guys from Machine were fighting."

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"I don’t know. Dave seemed all pissed off and kept arguing with everybody. I don't know what his problem is."

I think about what I told him last night. "No. I don't know either."

                        


(This is an excerpt from my novel, Comeback Road. Click to learn more, including how to read the whole thing.)

Comeback Road Chapter 11 (1/2)

(This is an excerpt from my novel, Comeback Road. Click to learn more, including how to read the whole thing.)

I'm lying on my back with the dim awareness that I'm supposed to be doing something. I'm not in bed. I don't know where I am and there's a terrible pain in my head. A voice is shouting something, but there's so much other noise it's hard to make it out. Then I understand, the voice is shouting my name.

"Terry! Terry man! Are you okay? Terry! Wake up!"

I try to open my eyes, but a stinging pain prevents me. I blink them open and shut, but I can't see anything. Everything is all hazy and black.

"I'm blind," I murmur.

"You're not blind. You've got blood in your eyes."

Those words are familiar. Where have I heard them before? Reservoir Dogs. Tim Roth tells one of the other bank robbers, you're not blind. You've got blood in your eyes.

"Are you okay? Can you sit up?"

The voice does not belong to Tim Roth. I know the voice. It belongs to Jason, my guitar player. He grabs my neck and shoulder and helps me sit up, but I still can't open my eyes.

"Jason man, I can't see. Where am I?"

"Jesus, Terry, we're on stage! We're in Barrie, at a gig. Can you get up?"

There is chaotic noise in the background, like a brawl.

"Can you grab me a towel or something? Everything is all black. What happened?"

"You got hit with a beer bottle." Someone holds a wet towel to my face and I grasp it, wiping my face clean. With my fingers I can feel the rough edge of a cut across the bridge of my nose.

"Lean back," I hear an unfamiliar voice say. "I'm going to pour some water over your face."

I do as I'm told and icy water splashes across my face. I wipe my eyes with the towel and blink. I can see murky shapes. With repeated blinking they sharpen into the faces of Jason and Mark and a few other people I assume to be bar staff. Harsh stage lights glare down on me.

The sound of the brawl dies down. I suppose whoever was fighting and tossing bottles must have been thrown out. The bar has a hum to it though. Everyone wants to know if the guy with the split face is okay. Is the poor baby all right? Maybe they're wondering if poor baby is going to get up and finish the show.

"I'm okay," I say. "Let's play."

"Are you kidding?" Jason asks in a shaky voice. "You want to keep playing?"

"Yeah." I grasp at the people around me and they help me to my feet. There's a cheer from the crowd, like when an injured player at a sporting event walks off the field under his own power. I blink into the lights and look out at the crowd. I don't recognize the bar. It's not a huge place, but the room is full. My head spins a little and I stagger back a step to gain my balance. Everything is mixed up. I look down at my feet, where the set list is taped to the hardwood floor of the stage. I have no idea if we had played any songs or if we had played them all.

"Jason, what song are we on?"

"Oh, this isn't cool, man. You need to see a doctor."

"C'mon, just tell me what song we're on."

"Um, we were playing 'End of Us' when you got hit, but seriously, let's forget it."

I wave the bar staff off the stage and adjust my mike stand. I look at Mark. He reluctantly gets back behind his drums. He looks wide-eyed and nervous.

"Ready?" I ask him.

"Sure, Terry, but we don't have to, you know?"

"Let's just start with the next song. 'Rough Go.'"

We start playing. I can here shouting from Jason. I look back at him. He's screaming something. I step towards him so I can hear him better.

"You're playing the wrong song!" he screams. I listen hard to what he and Mark are playing and I try to correct what I'm doing. When I think I've got it right I step up to the mike and begin singing, "Even after I've reached the end/ Even after you're gone…"

Jason screams at me. I look at him and I can make out "Wrong words! Wrong song!"

I look back out the crowd. They are standing open-mouthed, staring up at me. I lick my lips and taste the sickening flavor of iron. I look down at my hands thumping at the strings of my bass. My white t-shirt is splattered with red. Blood continues to drip from my nose and down off my chin.

I don't bother with singing. I keep banging out notes and Jason and Mark, faithful soldiers of rock that they are, continue playing along. "Hey," I say into the mike. "If someone would come up and wipe off my face, I would appreciate it."

Some chick climbs up onto the stage. She looks like a punk-pop chick, with long blonde hair a tight band t-shirt, plaid school-girl skirt and the whole bit. She picks the towel up off the floor and cleans off my bloody face. I try to stay in time with the band, keeping up with the changes while she drags the bloody towel over the jagged cut between my eyes. She drops the towel back onto the floor, does a pose for the crowd and hops off the stage to a big cheer.

"Thanks baby," I say into the mike, and she blows me a kiss. "You boys ready?" I say, and look back at Mark and Jason. We reach the chorus and I jump in screaming "Rough go! Why do you always give me such a rough go?" I think I'm singing the right part. Jason doesn't scream and tell me I'm wrong, so I sing it through and we bring the song to a finish.

According to the set list we have six songs to go, but looking at the names of the songs I can't remember how any of them start.

"Okay kiddies," I say to the audience. "I think we're going to cut this a bit short. We'll leave you with one last tune. This is called 'Sweet Leaf.'" It's not on the set list, but it's one we know and that I can remember. We hit it and play through, managing to keep it together. I stumble with the vocals, but we make it through to the end and get a big cheer. People clap and whistle, not so much because we played a great set but because they witnessed an unexpected and entertaining spectacle. That, and people love to see some jerk overcome adversity. And yeah, I think a bottle to the face classifies as adversity.

I hop off the side of the stage and there's a member of the bar staff right there with a clean wet towel which he immediately applies to my bleeding nose. Unable to see, I follow him as he leads me to a chair and sits me down.

"You might need some stitches there, dude," he says.

"Don't worry about that now," I say. "What the hell happened, anyway?"

"Some guys started fighting at the back of the crowd and somebody chucked a bottle. Just bad luck it caught you, I guess."

I feel a hand on my shoulder. "Nice one, Terry," I hear a female voice say.

"Sheila?"

She slaps my shoulder. "No, it's Gina. Jesus, are you brain damaged now?"

The first thing that crosses my mind is Gina, right, I slept with her. It was pretty good, too. I was good. I was good in the sack. She came twice. Also, I remember with more clarity where I am. I'm on tour with The Clutch Dogs, opening for Machine Within A Machine. I wonder if Gina thinks scars are sexy.

"Yeah, maybe I am brain damaged," I tell her. "At the very least I must have a concussion. I can't remember any of my kid's names."

"Jesus, you've got kids? How many?"

I pull the towel away from my face, look at the blood and press it back into place. "Let's see, how many kids do I have? Three, four, six, seven, um, none. So I guess I'm not brain damaged after all."

"Don't be so sure."

I hear another voice. It’s Wayne. "Terry, we'll help get your gear packed up. You just relax, okay?"

"Don't need to tell me twice." I look around. There is a semi-circle of kids around the chair where I'm sitting, all staring at me. "Oh, Jesus," I say and put the towel back up to my face. I ask the guy from the bar to get me a beer and silently wonder if I can make it through the rest of the night with the towel covering my face so I don't have to talk to anyone about how it feels to get clocked with a bottle half way through a song.

Punters come up asking if I'm okay. I nod and tell everyone I'm fine, but I don't take the towel from my face. Why not? Shame, I guess. I don't want people to see what a bleeder I am.

Some girl pulls a chair up next to me. She puts her arm around me and tries to take the towel. She wants to play Florence Nightingale, I guess.

"I'm cool," I say. "I've got it."

"It's okay," she says. "It's me, Christine."

The name is not familiar, but I let go of the towel and let her hold it. She keeps it against my face for a few seconds and then pulls it away, saying "Let me have a look. There, it's not too bad. You've stopped bleeding I think."

I look at her. She's mid-twenties, chubby-cute and somewhat familiar, but really I have no idea who she is. Maybe I talked to her earlier. My short-term memory is shot.

My beer shows up, and I take a long drink. I know that alcohol slows your blood's ability to form clots and so drinking is stupid when your nose is cut open, but my face hurts like hell and I hope for some pain relief. I'm sure if I have got a concussion, beer can only make things worse, but I can always blame the concussion for making me stupid enough to drink.

I look up at the stage. Jason and Mark are taking apart the drums, and the guys from Machine are lugging their gear up. I feel like a dick for not helping, and I start to get up. 'Christine,' grabs me by the shoulder and pulls me back down.

"No, no," she says. "You need to sit. Just rest here."

I turn on her with an angry look. "Do I even know you?"

Her smile drops. "We talked before you played."

"That doesn’t make you my doctor," I say. Grabbing my beer, I get up and lurch onto the stage. Mark is hefting the bass drum and I give him and hand with it.

"All right, Terry?" he asks.

"No, my head feels messed up," I say. "This might sound like a stupid question, but where are we staying tonight? I have no idea."

"The bar owner set us up at some guy's house," he says. "You really don't remember? Maybe you're like, seriously hurt."

"I'm fine, I'm fine. I just don't want to hang around here all night."

"We're not going to the house until after the bar closes. We've got a bit of a wait."

"Christ." I look back to where I was sitting. Christine is still there, watching me. Fair enough. If I have to hang around for a few hours I might as well let a girl dote on me. I stroll back over and sit down.

She half-turns away and says nothing. I see. I hurt her feelings. God. Chicks.

"You want a beer?" I ask her.

She turns back around. "Maybe later," she says. "Do you want to go outside and smoke a joint before the next band starts?"

I don't remember hearing about the effects of marijuana on concussions. Even though I'm fairly certain the effects are negative, I get up and follow her out. What's the worst that could happen? Permanent memory loss, motor skill damage, mild retardation. No one would even notice the difference.

We walk a block to her car and get in. She produces a joint from her purse, sparks it up, and we pass it back and forth. We talk while we smoke, but I'm not sure what we're talking about. I think at some point she puts her hand on my leg, but that's about the same time that I pass out.

To be continued....

(This is an excerpt from my novel, Comeback Road. Click to learn more, including how to read the whole thing.)