In Vino Veritas. in And The Rest.

Welcome to reality, you false-faced little travesty: you’re a statistic in stupidity.

Surfacing, sucking your thumb with a dirt-dry desert mouth, still sticky with syrupy, stale Amaretto and sickly-sour shame; needle-drips pinning your pathetic patchwork arms, still sordidly streaked with the greasy-grey grime of the pavement you passed out on.

Scraping open broken eyes against the heaviness of a hungover headache and the clinically-cold, whitewashed sterility of hospital lighting. Reborn to early morning as Dilapidated Drunken Barbie, bedraggled and debauched by the mindless distress of idiotic excess, in last night’s torn tights and your dumb-dolly dress; take a look at yourself: you’re a sordid, seedy, shameful mess.

You’re a stupid little renegade, admiring every step in retrograde reflected in the bathroom mirror; the hollow prizes dredged from the silt at the bottom of a shallow pool of self-obsession. Those ladder-rung ribs running up your throat; they’ll choke you as you knock back your prescribed chemical smiles with a vodka chaser. An empty stomach and intoxication, the only substitutes for self-esteem you seem to understand; hand-in-hand undoing you, they’ll ruin you.

You think you’re still young and invincible, growing old disgracefully in your distasteful faceful of showy cement camouflage; clinging grim, battered nails to the tattered coat-tails of your youth as it leaves with the breeze. Spritz yourself with the eau de toilette of ageing desperation and try running after the kids in your too-short dress and too-tall heels: you’re pathetic.

Your little friends look after you. The girl barely old enough to vote, who holds your hand on the filthy floor and cries tears of drunken fear. The girl with her teeth still traintracked in orthodontic braces, who apologises to the paramedics and says carefully, I don’t think she eats properly. Twelve years your junior, yet more responsible, more sensible, than you.

Keep doing the same thing and expect a different result: the definition not of insanity but inanity, hideous idiocy, downright stupidity. In a sickening cyclical circle, you replicate your own mistakes, repeatedly- too frequently- reliving every one in turn; you’re laughable: you never learn.