"Judge Robert Dautrieve presided over morning court, that strange, ritualistic theater that features morose and repentant drunks who reek of jailhouse funk, welfare cheats, deranged drifters, game poachers, and wife abusers whose frightened wives, with blackened eyes, dragging strings of children, plead for their husband's release."
From Dixie City Jam, by James Lee Burke.
I love this quote, bleak as it is, because it describes the hopeless, lost state of human beings who go around in circles, making the same mistakes, punishing themselves and suffering, and get up off the mat in the morning to do it all again. Despite the fact that "every sunrise reminds us that we can start fresh with a good atitude, positivity, and gratitude."
These are the broken people, the people who have really fucked up their lives. But I believe deeply that the same emotions are experienced by those who walk among us projecting confidence and stability. Hopelessness, feeling lost, - these feelings are not class-specific. They are democratic.
Isn't that wonderful?
Millions of these underground people, broken but projecting confidence and stability, slither through life every day like slugs, leaving a trail of slime behind them.
If you feel that you are pissing your life away, if you hate what you do and who you are, if you feel trapped in a role that breaks your bones every day (only to have them heal overnight) - then you are "the morose and repentant drunk who reeks of jailhouse funk" who knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the next botttle of wine will solve all his problems.
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