Tale 4 - Drink - First 33-50%

Every day of my life, my father warned me of the dangers of the demonic fluid. It was drink which unleashed all of man's evil and eliminated the barrier from beast. It was drink that eliminated health and happiness. Drink is danger, drink is trauma, drink is obscenity and humiliation, blasphemy in the eyes of God and excrement in the windows of memory. Drink is serenity's eternal expenditure: instants of bliss for an eternity of inner violence. 

Trauma is the intrusion of another soul. The intrusion never announces the full measure of his control, he simply demonstrates a new facet every day, intrusion doubling upon intrusion, exhibiting ever more masterfully that he, not we, are the part of our mind that thinks. 

Perhaps this other soul is a devil or dybbuk, perhaps he's simply another person who deliberately lodged himself within you, or perhaps he's another person burdened with his own dybbuk. But whomever he is, he, not you, masters the mind, and you become a spectator within your own consciousness. The self schisms, and half your mind whispers horrors to the other half. He begins to determine your decisions, and with every new decision he wins over you, you wonder ever more if he was you all along.   

For centuries, father did not touch drink. He knew of its ecstasies and torments as well as any man, but he saw what drink made him, and what drink made others, and its humiliations were repugnant. A whole earth on which man has neither self nor divinity, but only sense - pleasures to drown their pain, other people's pain to drown them in pleasure, a whole earth of trauma absorbed and trauma inflicted where man uses his divinity to inflict trauma all the worse. And so where the rest of Earth was wine, the House of Noah was water, kept fresh and pure in wells we cleaned every single day in blessings to a spirit whose name we never pronounced, and perhaps we never even knew. Ham and I knew not drink for an hundred years of our lives. 

And then the world became drink, not drink still and clear, but torrential and murderous. The temperature became warmer, and the whole earth became fire and rain. Then the sea level rose, and rose, and rose, and eventually all things on earth submerged within our new planet of cataclysmic tsunami. The planet murdered its unworthy caretakers, and all the Earth was but one large ocean, stewed in the iniquities of the billions it drowned and salted to parch those who floated. Yet again the world was without form and void - all remaining life lodged within an ark of 300 cubits. 

And not a drop to drink. The invisible spirit told us of the flood, he told father to build the ark, precisely how, and with what, and how large, and how many animals to gather, but he did not give us water. All we had was the water within our well, which outside the well turned to undrinkable sludge and excrement. There was only wine, and beer, and fermentation, and animals, and obscenity.