“These people are all idiots,” I tell Jake.

I really feel like punching someone

in the face.

How can I run a business like this?

 It's three in the afternoon on a Friday and I'm trying to calm down before we have our monthly office party. I'm trying hard not to be a dick.

After a few beers I start to loosen up, letting go of my rage, which transforms into overall frustration somewhere in the back of my head. It feels like being zen with frustration.

Mike, whose trade is drugs, gives me something to drink that I can't quite put my finger on. The bad feelings start to fade. And so does everything else. I don't really notice things anymore.  I take some wine, randomly interrupting people who are yapping away about unimportant bullshit anyway.

Then the dark starts coming, going. One moment I'm there, the next I'm nowhere. Slowly fading back and forth.

Jake asks me to go buy some more wine. So me and this girl go to the supermarket. Talking about God knows what, me autopiloting the hell out of the situation. I don't even hear myself talk, I only vaguely know I'm interacting. Like I'm watching myself from afar, not paying close enough attention. We get some bottles. I look straight through the check-out girl, like she's thin air. I muscle-remember  my PIN, which at the moment already feels like an accomplishment.

In my lucid moments I'm an irrational drunk. The rest of the time I don't fucking know what, what...

Things getting all Slaughterhouse-Five on me, skipping back and forth in time and place. I'm sitting in all of the rooms in our building, heavily drinking, one room per sip.

Suddenly I'm outside, talking to Jake about eating hamburgers the next day, male bonding, having epiphany after epiphany, hugging.

A little later, or earlier, Ron comes up to me in the hallway. Dude is mad as fuck but he's keeping his cool. Telling me not to swear so much and that cancer isn't funny. Ron is a natural born loser. A descendant of a long line of failures. Just recently the driving instructor was hitting on his girlfriend. What a deadbeat. I tell him I don't remember shit, but that he is probably right about me saying such things, and that I am almost one hundred percent sure I have a very good reason for acting the way I did.

Sitting in front of the building I tell this girl what a top-of-the-line loser this guy is. Doing this stupid dance and being drunk-guy-proud of it. She says it's her brother and walks away... ...Why would an employee invite her brother to an office party, Jesus Christ.

I'm in the Chesterfield room. People are doing coke.

Lights off, lights on. I'm at the top floor, wishing more cancer upon more people while sucking up to this new business partner who came by for a drink. While I'm brilliantly multitasking everything into pieces and fucking up like a pro, the darkness returns.

I'm standing next to my bike. Trying to open the lock with every key of the wrong key chain. Clueless. Trying to convince myself this is somehow not my fault and fighting off some upcoming panic.

The next day I get a message from Jake. He doesn't know shit about last night anymore, except me being all fucked up and him liking the hell out of my fuckedupness. He says he is skipping hamburgers that day.

Remorse hits me like crazy. I'm highly depressed for a week, with a slow, hardly noticeable decline to an almost bearable state over the next. All this time I try my hardest to avoid employees. I drink a bottle of wine every night to get to sleep, and hate myself.

Everything breaks down into fragments. There's no beginning anymore. No end either, for that matter. Shit is getting crazy.

I'm parking my bike in front of a kebab place.

 I'm inside, unable to say anything.

They decide to make me a kebab.