Mysticism and the Whiskey Monopoly of My Heart

There's a particularly mystical tune on the new John Vanderslice album that bellows a refrain of "I've never been lonelier/ I've never been lonelier," a line I've been unnaturally fond of for the past two weeks. Of course, seeing the line written out by my eager digits clicking fading alpha-numerals doesn't really do it justice. Of course. But there's a time in everyone's life when your loneliness becomes this palpable pink elephant, sitting in your corner, taunting you, making your stomach churn and twist in boundless yearning. It requires that you fend off the cobwebs of solitude; those dusty relics championed by the meek for purposes of their own self-glory in the face of societal ineptitude. It takes pleasure in making sure you know you are the lowest form of matter currently breathing oxygen on Blue Orb Three. And it makes you drink. Yes, loneliness is a vengeful whore, ripe with the sores from unprotected one-offs.
For instance, at the very moment I'm writing this line, I am in my creaking, spider-thick living room, casually sipping a glass of Jameson. And I'm not sure why. I think it's because my abilities to spout anything even closely resembling profundity is usually inversely proportional to how much alcohol I've had. Once my actual vision is skewed, my hidden perceptions are as free as the French. Or maybe I just miss my girlfriend.
Yeah, let's talk about her for a while. She's the problem, or rather, her absence has spiraled me into this stinking whiskey cave. So let's discover, together, the deepest caverns of my gratitude and love for my best friend and girlfriend, Robin.
The Suffocation was once a muck of equal parts self-loathing and spite for the ease of humanity to persevere in the grimacing face of the 21st Century. For longer than I planned, I became consumed by an idea of perfectly effectual reasoning to combat the ills of man - or men whose ethics stemmed from weakened wills at the hands of crippling insecurity. My perspective on the evilness of man and all its blasted Death and Money and Hate and Lies is only slightly less vigorous these days, and the only person who could have dropped the mercury even that much has been Robin. Sweet Robin, who told everyone she was from Redding to break the ice while in initial meetings with my friends; who drank too many Heinekens at a Chamber of Commerce ribbon cutting for my work and jumped a cue ball onto the reverberating floors of my office, cackling like a Sahara beast into the night; who laughs out at the world in defiance of regimen when everything's a mess; who taught me that life is an adventure not for pity but for lust; who screams into the crisp morning air out in front of our home that she loves me; whose fearlessness commands the admission of man's darkest secrets, regardless of length of acquaintance; who conquered Europe in 2006 and visited postcard outposts in Switzerland with sheep and trampolines; who breaks the rules and expects nothing less from anyone else around her; who stayed behind to be with me when her brood had jumped the sinking ship of Chico for sturdier vessels; who opened my eyes to a life I'd have never known without her kind, mystical embrace; who sings like sweet wind and writes for passion over money; who longs for me even now at a camp site in Chester where the warm lake water teases her toes; who admits when she's wrong; who laughs louder and more jovially than even the most advanced sitcom laugh track; who layers clothing never meant to be layered in fantastic rainbows of fabric lining the modest curves of her torso; who gives; who loves.
There are, of course, always more words to describe how one person has affected your life. How they've become half of your whole. How their absence makes you wince. How much you love them. Of course there are...