Drinking is not being drunk, being a drunk. Drinking is not blacking out, cleaning vomit off your shoes in the morning. It's not scerocis of the liver at age 25, leaving your loved ones to wonder about the why-s.

Drinking can be a pleasant night out with friends, a pleasant night in with family. Drinking can break down the walls we hold around us, allow us to see people in ways we could never have concieved. Drinking can show us ourselves through others' eyes, often more positively than we might think.

Drinking's easy to use and to overuse, especially for the wrong reasons. But to demonize alcohol, to deem it an evil is to take the easy way out as well. Self control is a valuable and necessary asset in life. The ability to excercise it and use it well can bar a great deal of pain, while in turn precipitating a great deal of happiness.

Challenge

Anger

Describe vividly how you feel the emotion 'Anger'. Does it spread like wildfire in your body or does it start with the slow increase of your heartbeat. Does it urge you to create chaos or do you push your demon down back into its cage. I'd like to read all responses :)

Asteria in Poetry & Free Verse

59 reads

The simplest thing to be

The blood in my arms is ice, and I cannot feel them. It seeps down my legs, blossoms in my chest like a rose of frozen crystal. A rose whose thorny vines entwine me, and hold me. And I cannot move save for a tremble that grows softly but surely as a breeze through autumn woods. And I cannot speak. For what could I say to impart the true depth of my rage. So I let it take me. Lost and alone in the blizzard, feeling fading away until I am not angry, or sad, or fearful. I am nothing, for that is the simplest thing to be.

Challenge

ABAB Paranormal

Write a poem using the ABAB rhyme scheme. Topics to include anything paranormal but with absolutely no reference or mention of love. The ABAB rhyme scheme means that for every four lines, the first and third lines will rhyme with each other and the second and fourth lines will also rhyme with each other Winner will be chosen by CSteger. Please tag me in the comments, but mass tagging will result in disqualification. Thanks and have fun!

Asteria

45 reads

Zombies’ Day Out

The brunch plans were a simple task

But the screaming wouldn’t cease!

(Guess it’s just too much to ask

To eat some brains in peace)

Challenge

Challenge of the Week LXXXI

"I write so that I might understand what I think" - various authors. Choose a topic about which you're not quite sure what you think. Perhaps it's something you've been thinking a lot about, or something you wish you understood better. Then write. Write until you uncover a pearl of lucidity.

Asteria

34 reads

Decisions

I don't know what I want to do with my life--I never really have. And I'm nearing the end of when that indecision is acceptable. I could never choose how others did, favorite movies, and actors, and songs. Never. And I couldn't choose what I wanted to be. So I picked something, threw a metaphoric dart at a list of majors and slogged on from there.

It's not like I'm inept. In fact, I've always been a pretty fair hand at anything I tried. And maybe that's a piece of the problem. It's human nature to gravitate toward that which we do well, so where does that leave someone who's the same at everything.

Interest drives many ambitions as well, and I do have interests. But mine last for a day, or an afternoon, or an hour. Not a lifetime. One night I learned the names and locations of every country on the planet, because I felt like it. Most days I can't force myself off the couch.

The worst part of it all is the self-awareness, the knowing. Knowing the potential I have and my inability to use it. Seeing the unfulfillable deadline drawing slowly and relentlessly nearer. But on top of it all, what truly plagues me is holding in my soul the indisputable fact that my problem is not deciding what I want to do most with my life. It's that there is nothing I have ever wanted to do with it.