Filed under: Uncategorized
Absence does make the heart grow fonder, correct?
This is one of those horrible idioms of the English language that belies a hidden meaning well beneath the statement’s intent: one’s absence makes her new-again presence welcome. Pah! I dispute that notion. Absence — in the case of a long, lost love or a particularly close friend or family member — is horrid. You feel weaker with their absence.
Alas, adding qualifiers to any given quotes weakens it. Being pithy, that’s the key! Who would keep speaking of that famous statement if it was worded: “A fool and his money are soon parted… assuming the fool in question was not particularly bright and was involved in some complicated pyramid scheme or other financial scam.” It does lose some of its heft.
But I have been away from my love for many a-moon now, and I am on the verge of being near her again! The wait is almost unbearable! I am as fond of her as I have ever been, but her absence doesn’t add to my fondness. A fix to the language, if I may?
“Absence makes the beloved grow larger in the hearts of their lovers.”
Not interesting enough? Then piss off.
-Cheers, I.P.
I cannot help but consume alcohol as though it is my nature, despite judgments cast.
After an evening spent in the company of demon rum, I have chosen to cast aside the standards placed upon me by my contemporaries. I could coddle the path laid out by my forebears, with their lack of temerity and abundance of caution (“Alcohol? Why no! never touched the stuff. Is this brown liquid it? I should try some to be sure”) and obfuscate the details of my education — rough as it is.
Whiskey is my chambermaid, and to deny it would be to shrug off a part of my life.
I consumed a metric tonne of liquor this evening, and took what was an uneventful evening and made it magical — things disappeared without my knowledge, heavy items levitated against my will (“Is that barstool flying? Huzzah!”), and I saw a dove turn into a crow after some serious urging. (Whether this was real or merely a figment of my imagination stands left to be discovered. A dove DID vanish, and a crow DID appear. Whether the dove was thrown into a gunny-sack and replaced by a stand-by bird is a matter for a much, much higher power, let alone someone as drunk as myself.)
After some serious consultation with my horoscope, I knocked back several drinks in the course of a single sitting. Aged whiskey, gently poured over ice in a rocks glass, was the poison of choice to begin. However, this was occasionally interrupted by the droning obnoxiousness of the simpliwhorus caterwalus, better known colloquially as the common bar whore, and a glass of red wine.
What luck! To hear such a creature prattle on about their lack of faith in their significant other — surely, these peasants are alone in their suffering! And never has a single person ever experienced such heartache. Well, perhaps a creature of imagination from Shakespeare… but only then for a brief spell before being dispatched by a curved knife or poison or similar implement of ridiculous endangerment.
I contemplated the existence of worlds far beyond our own. Sprawling, expansive landscapes which contain our enemies and friends alike, forever pursuing a brokered peace that would always be a distant memory. A healthy thought, I imagined, would be to prod these ideas into a mainstream path. These ideas came to a screeching halt in the face of the whore. What luck! My dreams would be embodied and dispatched in a single motion — joy.
“I think you should…”
Oh, what rapture. The words that dare not be spoken; words which belie the true assumptions and intentions of the whore. What is said is “I think you should tell her that you feel threatened,” but what is meant is “I think you’re clearly more interested in sleeping with me and you might as well be honest, shouldn’t you? Would you like to go get randy in the back of that Dodge pick-up?”
The whiskey helps matters. It dulls what little sense I have left, and ameliorates the bond between myself and humanity. After several slugs of whiskey, I can almost tolerate the obnoxiousness wafting from the whore — in fact, I start to assume a sort-of brotherly bond; I connect with the woman. Casting my judgment does become more difficult, but I try nonetheless.
After several more drinks of a random nature, I begin to see the merit in “hugging.” Not as a normal enterprise, but the entire emotional concept behind having one human being physically wrap another. Silly as it is, there is some merit behind the move. Perhaps a little more emotional connection between Mussolini and his mistress might have halted events as aggressive as the hangings or at least staved off some of the more egregious mistakes of the Third Reich. Or, at the very least, Stalin may not have been quite a dick.
I listen to the braying of the barnyard animals and begin to feel pangs of sympathy. And teetotalers say nothing good comes of liquor!
After several hours of liquor and sulfites from wine, I begin to devolve into a creature not fit for this world. And that is when I become interesting. The latter half of the evening became a clusterfuck of alcohol and debauched wonderment… to be left well alone until another time.
-Cheers, I.P.
Filed under: lessons in lager
Ah, glorious tipple at noontime. Best way to blot out the drudgery of the morning and innoculate against the afternoon. Or it was. The bastards lost their tussle with the 18th Amendment to the Constitution and their feeble efforts at prohibition, so they turned their daggers on the working class! Fie!
A man should have no worries about slugging back a few drinks in the middle of the day without getting an eyeball from some mauve-clad matron across the restaurant floor. I imagine those same diginified ladies gulped white wine glass whole before the conception of their children.
Life, with its myriad agents, is far too aggravating without liquid encouragement. But the question is: how does one enjoy a mid-day meal properly, while keeping those hounds of conformity at bay?
The trick is, in a word, the flask. Moderately shaped containers, savvy to the world around them, these hip-sized vessels are the perfect accompaniment to a day spent staring at the sun or casting doubt to the four winds. They can fill out an afternoon with your alcohol of choice, or simply heel the cad in you with a tumbler of sloe gin. These devices manage the unbelievable: keeping the animal drunk contained well within the man. A feat worthy of Jesus, or at least one of those Mormon fellas!
So, the resolution to these dark days is the flask; it can pour like a jug, sip like a glass, and can marvel like a child’s toy.
-Cheers, I.P.
The world may be a evil, dirty mess, filled with vagrants who cross you cock-eyed with an ill temper in their breast and the wheeze of whiskey on their breath. Where weaker men seek to float above the fray and cast their judgment downward, I will seek solace in the twisting netherworld of drink and redemption, ever to look up. To the bowels of hell I will traipse, with Dante’s Inferno as a guidebook and the examples of legendary writers — all drunks — before me to light the path.
Welcome… and to alcohol!
-Cheers, I.P.
“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
