I don’t remember when I started drinking a beer with lunch every day, but so far it’s been working; it loosens my fingers and the ink spills from my pen like pus from a freshly lanced boil, oozing and spreading across the page, flowing from one word to the next, paragraph after paragraph—ink this black has force behind it; I feel strong after lunch, invincible even—the failures of the morning behind me, the words I write now are beyond editing, flawless and clean, ready for print the moment they slide out of the nib, liquid and loose, unencumbered by the stark white page beneath them, the college-ruled lines struggling to hold them in place, struggling to even keep them on the page at all—that’s how it feels at least, but I won’t know for sure until this beer leaves my head and takes away the fog, so I cut it with a short glass of rum and orange juice, thinking this will wake me from my hop-induced sudden drowsiness and sense of well being, but all it does is remind me of the island that I visited once and haven’t returned to yet, so in my sorrow I grab whiskey and soda and drift gently into my pre-dinner delirium.