"Gullet" - Writing Exercise

   After weeks of working at a dive bar, six months living in a dinky two-bedroom apartment with a chick who goes by Strawberry but is legally named Amanda, and days of alternating between vegetables and take-out, rum and top-shelf bourbon with my roommate’s blues band and a crappy wannabe-musician who works in insurance, I wake up on a Monday in April, feeling very sick with a line of dried drool winding from my mouth to my jaw.
I’m watching pale sunlight creep through a busted set of window blinds. I roll over on my mattress on the floor, vomit repeatedly into a nearby garbage can, sweating, my eyes rolling closed, the blank wall ahead of me looking unfamiliar. So I imagine how my parents might react if they saw me like this, what my late grandfather might say (his drinking problem didn’t follow him into the afterlife, right?)…and my breathing is still slow…probably worrisome.
 I think of my friends back home in Massachusetts, my only true pals…I think of my favorite toys as a kid, little horse figurines I named Bennett, Shy, and my favorite: Butterscotch; she had a symbol on her rump, though I forgot what. 
Breathing still strange, I consider rolling onto my back again, but the very idea is exhausting. Bile bubbles in my stomach. I keep sweating. Someone should be here with a washcloth. I need an IV drip, can't will myself to open my eyes. Fingers refuse to move. Every part of me is sleepy and shutting down. Damn. The crack in the ceiling doesn't look familiar. Oh hell ...that bottle with the…whatever was on the label…and the stuff that burned deep in my throat…the stuff that made me both tired and awake...the untrustworthy party stuff I poured down my gullet as if it would whisk me off to a higher plane of blues-listening, invincible, dancing, burping, drunken email-making, glow stick-waving, fist-pumping, smirking, biker jacket-wearing, pissing, puking, thumbnail-painting, ramen-eating, arguing, laughing, gyrating, tearing up, coughing, prank call-making, father-disappointing, college-failing euphoria and miserable, brooding coolness that rock-and-roll biographies are made of. I've wanted the gritty, alluring, dark, disturbingly poetic life and death for so long, having no career goals beyond writing and tumbling through experiences and existing.
 I wanted to stay self-centered, isn't that messed up? I did want a life all about myself and now...now I've taken that choice and...I'm having long stretches of immobility, dehydration, flashing back through random cobwebs in my memory. 
Darkness rumbles in my chest. A warm discomfort is creeping through. I personify powerlessness. In misery I do lie.