Lideta: Me and Dionysus
There is no rest. There never is.
Yesterday was Lideta, which is supposed to be some kind of Orthodox Tewahedo thing saints and incense and solemnity but what it actually is, is five thousand people getting aggressively drunk in the street and dancing like the world is ending and nobody sent the memo. Which, when you think about it, is probably closer to what the saints intended anyway.
I stood on the balcony for a while just watching the chaos swirl. Somewhere in the crowd a man was playing a drum that had no business being that loud, and a woman was spinning in circles with a bottle in each hand like she was trying to summon something. And maybe she was. Because what it felt like what it really felt like was Anthesteria. The old Greek thing. The Festival of Souls. Three days of opening the wine jars and letting the dead walk among us. Dionysus doesn’t give a shit about your church calendar. He shows up when the rhythm hits and the glasses come out. And yesterday, he was here. I could feel him grinning in the heat.
Getting any sleep was a joke. A bad joke. The kind you tell at four in the morning when your brain is short-circuiting. The noise didn’t stop it just changed shape. Became something internal. I finally drifted off around the time the bats started hunting, and then the dreams came.
And oh, man. The dreams.
Andre Breton would have taken one look at this stuff and gone back to bed permanently. I’m talking impossible geometries. Talking a room where the walls were made of wet newspaper and the headlines kept changing. Talking a conversation with a woman who had no face but kept talking anyway, her voice coming from somewhere behind my left ear. Talking a staircase that went down for miles and ended in a room full of clocks all ticking at different speeds. At one point I was pretty sure I was dead, but I didn’t have the energy to care, and anyway the dream me figured it wouldn’t make much difference to the work situation.
And now it’s Sunday. The sun is up, the streets are quiet except for the sound of brooms pushing glass into piles, and there are about twelve hours of things I should be doing. But I’m sitting here with a cigarette burning to ash in my hand, staring at the wall, thinking about how “ain’t no rest for the wicked” isn’t just a song lyric it’s the whole damn thesis statement of being alive.
Money don’t grow on trees. Never has. You get up, you go out, you do the thing, you come back, you do it again. Even when your head is full of Lideta and Anthesteria and dead poets and dreams that make no sense. Even when Dionysus is standing in the corner of your vision, laughing at you, holding a bottle you know you shouldn’t open.
Especially then.
But you open it anyway. Because that’s the deal.
And somewhere, André Breton rolls over in his grave, reaches for a pen, and writes: “Yes. This. Exactly this.”