Year in Review

[jack_babalon]

January 1st, 2012. Somewhere around 3 am at the Cafe Perilous.

I'm sitting at the bar. Sipping on a Jack on the rocks solo. Black Sabbath piped off the laptop. Magpie's rock star posse gathered at the other end of the cafe drunkenly hootering, hollering and dancing in the new year. Roll call: Magpie. His Gal Friday. Bob Dracula. Mistress Ethereal. Red. Double Dee. A few others best not or yet to be named. Kelly Krampus is bartending and ready to go. We're well past last call. I'm ready to sneak out, before anyone notices me, and that of course is when Lady Trouble sits down right next to me.

"Ma'am." I say by way of greeting while staring into my drink.

"Hello, Jack." She smiles friendly, almost sympathetically. "Do you remember me? Not the body you're ever so carefully not looking at, but rather this voice broadcasting at a frequency between thought and ear from the Land on Shadow's Edge?"

Of course I remember Lady Trouble. At an early age, I invoked the Goddess Eris and in supplication before her wild grace asked for a muse. What I got was Lady Trouble - a sort phantom tulpa that appears to me in times of lonely crisis. She speaks in that weird hyper-flowery language I dug as a kid and still makes many a reader roll their eyes.

"Nod if you can receive this broadcast, Jack." She says. "It gets harder to reach you each year and I don't have the manna to burn."

I nod at my drink looking at Lady Trouble solely through its reflection.

"Okay. Well, I'm 'hear' to deliver a message to you and you're really, really going to want to take a big sip off that drink before I do."

I comply and go to light up a cigarette chaser for good measure when I remember you can't smoke in here. I let the cigarette hang stupidly in my mouth instead. With a roll of my hand the voice will see but the host's eye won't catch, I tell Lady Trouble to lay it on me.

"O, my Bon Motley Fool." She sighs: "It's been a rough year you've just faced, but I haven't the time to sugar coat this rough prophecy you must swallow. What that was, was a gauntlet. This year will be the full duel and will strike with a lot more than even an iron glove's sting. You knew this without my warning. But though you think you're ready for it, that you've soul searched high and low (and quite literally so), you're not. Your father's passing will deliver upon your shoulder Anger's Angel and in your black Hamlet mood swings you will count yourself alone no matter how many friends should flock to your aid. You will feel betrayed. You will feel hurt, haunted and hunted. You will cry in the dark like a little boy and instead of your father coming to your rescue there will be no one there at all. Not even me."

And I close my eyes, nod the slightest of confirmations and make my way to leave, because, really? what the fuck else is there to here at this point.

"Wait." She says and I mid turn on my stool. "Finish your drink and allow me finish my prophecy while I can. This is the year you also start to grow up. You will be petrified as you drive down Ponce De Leon in rush hour, your first time behind the wheel of a car since you wrecked Johnny Law's truck. But you make it down Ponce, down Scott Boulevard and back to the Old Fourth Ward. You will drive on highways. You will learn how much fun an empty stretch of road can be as you gun your engine with no eyes but your own on you. For the first time, you will you are not flawed and it won't be last. You will face your fear of stage for the first time since you joined a Collective farewell to Saint Gonzo. Your hands will shake, the lights will blind, the weight of their attention will hang on your piece and you will learn to not stammer, to not stutter and deliver your words against the rabbit race of your heart. Then slowly, you will discover a terrible confidence. You will believe in yourself, at first bitterly so. In the mask of your daydreams your reflections will cast you as the last survivor of a great resistance fighting the unknown in a land where all you love has fallen. A modern Narcissus trapped by the reflection in the puddles gathering over the grave. But then you will see there are others who not only need, but love you. Often not in the manner you wished, but a love sincere if not supreme. You will see, for the first time in a long time, not the failure you thought you were in your father's eyes but rather the person he knew you could always be. And when you do you will no longer play the role of lonely survivor in the stage of your imagination, but the rather the smiling hero of your own ongoing adventure. "

I start to tear to up and down my drink instead. Ice cubes and all. The cold shock keeps me focused. Kelly Krampus gives me a weird eye and I keep my eye off Lady Trouble. Looking instead out the door to my escape.

"Jack, there's just one last thing." Lady Trouble says her voice growing fainter so that it's overlapping with the ambient chatter of the room. "When you walk out of here. You'll forget everything I just told you. Remember that was Eris' bargain with you. A muse that will speak true , but if you fail to capture my words immediately they vanish from memory and go back to her. You may have five minutes to jot this down or an hour. So act fast. Act..."

"What?"

"I said 'I don't understand why you always just sit here on your own'.'" And the woman speaking isn't Lady Trouble anymore.

"Uh," I get up and pat myself down in a mime of searching for my cigarettes.

"It's in your mouth." She says and there's an eruption of laughter from behind her aimed at more dance.

"Appreciate that." I nod respectfully rising to head outside and before I can think to ask Kelly Krampus for a pen to jot down the prophecy a crash of tables and empty glasses ignite behind us. We bolt over to check the scene. An inebriated dance step resulted in a crash of an empty glass and much commotion. I go over to check on the scene. Magpie asks where I've been? I go to answer but I can't quite remember what I was just doing. Outside about to have a smoke maybe... or what was that about Anger's Angel or grave's reflection. It doesn't matter. I'm sure it'll come back to me at some point.