The Dharma Bar has this daily special: You can drink as much beer as you want, but you can't use your hands or, you can't ask someone else to help you, and you can't tell the bartender where to put the glass containing your brew.
Once again, I sat on a comfortable stool with a pint of Moonfinger IPA resting on the worn wood before me, the bald bartender smiling as he watched me in a way that made me feel he didn't see me, or he saw something besides me that happened to be caught in the shape of me.
I leaned in and took that first sip. It was easy to get mouthful number one. I let it linger on my tongue, dreamed of the inebriation and satiation that it promised, and swallowed so to get ready for more. Yet I was stuck: After the first dip, going further became impossible. My mouth was too wide and my tongue too short to reach the remaining liquid. Without my hands—or my feet—I could not tilt the glass. All I had was this desire to drink for nothing, to run from my worries without adding to them with yet another cost. The longer I stared and calculated a way to take what I wanted, the more intense my desire grew. The beer became more than a casual break from reality—it became everything, it became the only thing I needed, it became the reason for all other parts of my being. I wanted that beer. I needed that beer. But I had no means to hold it aloft so it could become mine.
I sat for weeks. The beer began to stink: rot and bacteria and other life claiming it for its own. Didn't matter. I still wanted it. The weeks became months. My back started to ache. The pain eventually went away. I wasn't sure when, but my beard was long and gray, and my vision had grown fuzzier. I could still see the mug and the changing liquid within it—no longer a golden fluid but a black sludge bubbling and shifting with new life, new stories speaking to me of new promises for taking away all that worried me.
The bartender watched, still smiling.
There is in taking things, a thirst, a clinging, and a grasping.