From Dale Pendell:

The ally's secret face is terror. The alcohol ally is like a slime, slow moving, growing on you, at first only a fine veneer, like a slug trail. But later more layers collect, until you feel unclean. Feel your steps weighted. Feel every hour of the day a tedious distraction and ordeal. You finish as quickly as you can, so that you can return to your place among the rocks were the ally is happy and thrives.

The ally likes darkness. It doesn't like to move around a lot. A little feeding. Mostly, it likes you, your body, your brain, your dreams. It likes a chair, if you have one.

Once it's fed and watered, it tells you that you can leave your place among the rocks, that you can arise from your mossy boulders and enter the world of humankind, but you seldom do. At such times the growing weight of the layers of film that the ally has coated over you seems to lighten and soften. The mass becomes gelatinous and pliable, and you feel free.

Pain is banished or forgotten.

The world is light. You feel spontaneous. Problems are solvable or ignorable. And you can live like that for a very long time perhaps. For a very long time indeed. Maybe until you die.

Or maybe not.

Maybe the mass of stuff that the alcohol plant has deposited on you begins to harden. Maybe you haven't been able to feed it enough and the veneer has begun to crack. It's like the way the wine itself kills the yeast, its own mother, when the poison is fully formed. Then it is time for your friend across the table to unmask. He does, and you see that he is not there, that he has already departed. In fact, he has not been there for some years, or perhaps it is she. Only the coating, the facade deposited day after day by the poison, has been keeping you company.

In truth, you are totally alone, and frighteningly alone. And tonight, of all nights, you are out of food. A night like this, when you are alone and people that you don't want to talk to are knocking on your doors and windows. You are aware that soon they will abandon civility all together and just force their way in.

Oh, it's got you now. By the balls, by the short hairs, got your tit in a wringer, it does. It's got the hold on you. It's got tiny wet sucking fingers, green fingers - it's the slime, and it's got you.

It's saying it is time to start paying your dues. It's saying that it is time to start feeling all that pain that has built up on you like a crust. It's saying that it is time to get back to work. To free your words. To face your children, your spouse, your divorce, your ruin of your life, or perhaps its success. That it is time to deal with the devil you have created. For they are all your creations, all of them. It is your own children that call to you.

It's a sneaky kind of plant, a patient kind of plant. It is glad to wait, to let you control it. It is always ready to talk or parley and negotiate. But note, the plant is a shrewd negotiator. It loves to make deals, but it always takes the first night for itself: you say to the ally, "OK, I'll spend tonight with you, but tomorrow night I spend with my family, and you stay locked up in the cupboard." It will always say yes to deals like this, but never to the converse.

It's a nightmare. It's a slime well. Every direction is uphill, and it's all ice.

The ally says that it is time to deal with the devil you have created. It is your own creation, it is your art. It is, perhaps, gothic, but nonetheless there is an inner integrity to it. It is your genius, only your genius could have created such an elaborate prison for your own self. The ally is telling you you have built enough. Enough locks, enough doors, enough curtains and shades, bars and obstacles. They are all yours to burn.

Look upon it as the devil's firewood, and now you have a shed-ful. Call it your "material" in the alchemical sense. So there is still cause for hope, for now you have a practice, you have a discipline, a path - a true path and an everyday path - probably what you were after from the beginning.

Sun doctors, of course, avoid this wonderful creative opportunity, if they can.

(Dale Pendell, Pharmako/poeia)