He hit the streets fast, rapid journey back through the booze and drink addled memories of old bars where he had wasted the nights of his youth shaking and stirring resonances... memories of former dissolute generations reaching back to Hemingway and Scott Fitgerald and back beyond the expatriate bohemia scene back to the Paris of rimbaud verlaine etcRimbaud Verlaine Baudelaire the flaneurs of the Nineteenth Century - the doomed temporary autonomous zone of the Commune -

back through the ghosts under the cobbles to some point where he felt he could commune with the gods themselves of Dionysian riot and rut...

Booze always provoked this excess of romanticism and maybe he thought booze is some dumbing central nervous system downer after the first flash of euphoria that provoked sentimentality and self-pity, and part of the necessary ground for a romantic view of the world in the Late Twentieth century of this grim turning...

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