You do not recall the exact circumstances under which you found your self peeing into a water bottle while holding a lemon slice in your mouth, but you recall clearly the spark of inspiration that struck you when your shriveled prune of a brain realized for the first time, at twenty-three years of age, that urine and lemonade can look quite similar.
It didn’t take long for you to put this to “practical” use, because you don’t know the meaning of the word practical, and put the lemon into the bottle of your pee and placed it in a conspicuous place on skid row, of which you have a full view from your apartment window. Any truly thirsty denizen of the town’s most populous homeless community would find this seemingly innocuous bottle of “lemonade” a prize and chug it on the spot without a second thought. It’s worked several times, and by “worked” you mean, of course, that you’ve managed to show people at what they thought was rock bottom that you can always dig a little deeper into the bedrock.
Why? You decided it was time to teach homeless people the lesson that it was not okay to fall on hard times and desperately strive to survive in a city that hates you with literally no support system. You believe this is an important lesson for them to learn because long ago something bright and warm inside your soul died and left behind a festering, oozing wound you repeatedly try to salve by filling it with the suffering of others, but every time you throw in the screams of your victims they disappear into the wound and no echo is ever heard.
You are beginning to think the hole in your soul has no bottom.