Circumstances shape people and some are more blessed than others. I try not to let my annoyance become too obvious that this world in which I am now anchored, through which I am dragging myself with cracked and dirty fingernails, is a mere source of adventure and new impressions for unmotivated students and untalented artists and writers. That really my friends and I are just bit parts in the fanciful montage of young men who come to Paris to earn their stripes and then be gone.  

  Where has the time gone? The hour of the 'Green Fairy' is soon here, and I must lay out more sugar cubes. If I was blind-folded, I could tell you the time of day it was simply by raising my nose in the air and sniffing. Mornings have the sizzling, buttery comfort of frying eggs; late mornings start to choke up with pungent cigarettes and coffee; then, my favorite, the steaming wafts of soup; before the dreaded hour where absinthe is ordered in enthusiastic rounds and then slowly, you can actually witness a palpable descent into sadness.

  You see, here we are a safe-house from the visceral, gut punch of rejection by dealers, lovers, friends, publishers. Some handle it with table-thumping bravado and another round of vermouth, but the absinthe gently finger-tips others towards the edge. They think they are being soothed but as I serve up another glass of the iced, opal-green elixer, their shoulders slump a little further, their breathing sinks a little deeper, their eyes take on the flinty glaze of the browbeaten. Within a few hours, their demolition will be complete.