DING! DONG! THE WITCH IS DEAD!

DING! DONG! THE WITCH IS DEAD!

A Renewd Optomism In The American Way Of Life...

Let's compare Trump’s political defeat to the virtual demise of the wicked witch of the east or west! The parallel is clear in spite of the artificially clueless and deliberately murky manner of twenty-first century American culture. Notwithstanding, so many Americans and dreamers mark November 6, 2020 as the first time in four years they could stop living in fear of an omnipresent evil. To these good people a new optimism emerged when the Trump administration died due to causes of the popular and electoral vote… 

When The Wizard of Oz premiered 81 years ago on August 25, 1939 its messages of safety and danger ran concurrently with the rise fascism.  The Nazi party was rising in Germany. The evil regimes of Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain spearheaded the expansion of fascism in Europe. Millions of people would die in a second world war in order to set humankind back on a path to freedom. In comparative contrast Trumps presidency shows an incontrovertible likeness to the popular rise of Hitler and the deadly, fascist regimes of his time.  Many believe that Trump has wittingly spirited into life the likes of an old American evil not seen since the heyday of the Klu Klux Klan… his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again" is encrypted with divisive and hate-mongering allusions to racial superiority, systemic disenfranchisement and oppression.

As the news that Biden had been declared President-Elect broadcast over the innumerable streams of social media I heard a solid hour of urban revelry in the streets… fireworks, singing, shouting, horn-blowing, dancing, cheering and the like. I quickly summoned my friends to join me for a long awaited cocktail party and we Cheersed-In the historic occasion in my garden on the unseasonably warm night of November 6, 2020…

Reveling that night we borrowed a familiar tune from The Wizard Of Oz making it our theme.  We felt safer in the moment but each of us understood that certain danger lay ahead and as we had done with our votes committed to face and challenge our fears head on. That an evil so profound could have grown to power right before our eyes was a bitter wake up call. That evil I'd put in check for the moment. In the ensuing months and years we understood that we would be called upon to rise up to defeat that challenge! But in the moment…  it was ever so fulfilling to sing the words…

 “DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD!”.

BY BIDADDY BLUES

LIFE O'ER COCKTAILS: An Examination Of Resilience And Courage In The Face Of The Unknown...

18th Century Microscope

LIFE O'ER COCKTAILS

Sunday brunch found me reveling o'er the handsome libations of the moment. Those sacred sips spirited our conversant mood during that hallowed celebration dutifully spicing the sensory effects of a well-earned buzz… but that heady euphoria had been jealously competing with the sobering perspective of the weekdays ahead. Clearly the former won! That we brunched at all became so sinfully tinctured with the lustiness of blind-determination I easily permitted myself to succumb to the rapture of irrevocably dalliant optimism. I could not help but call it a scandalous flirt and encouraged it to more decadent heights... I applauded our willingness to challenge the depressingly hermetic range of options yawning before us. For they all appeared fundamentally sensible but ultimately lost the comparative test between what men call practical and what artists call sublime! I recall its magic personified as a day about town ever-refreshed by a handsomely plentiful spill of well-crafted and chilled cocktails! O' and that was certainly the first thing upon which we agreed. The second was that we enjoyed being free to be out amidst other human beings whether or not they were as equally cocktailed as us. The preferred combination of drink and circus gave us all inspiration to do the good thing. And we did. As a matter of fact my friends let us all pause and raise a glass to “drinking with the masses" as opposed to self-medicating at home and alone!

CHEERS!

Microscope and Case Circa 1750

Understand me… I get my fair share of quiet and contemplative time… but a city-boy like me needs to get his regular dose of public frolic and romp in! To me it’s all circus! To me the world is a disco and I just want to get in an occasional Latin hustle! Like John Travolta stepping his way through the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever I proclaim my passion to go forth living, loving and dreaming without fear of what unforeseen fate may lay ahead!

In the previous paragraphs I’ve managed merely to allude to the very thing which actually inspired this discussion. Those of you who’ve concluded the subject to be cocktails should take penance. Hopefully my metaphoric suppression of its identity has been unsuccessful at concealing that this entire article is a commentary on the social effects of COVID-19 and not the effects of alcohol. I could but will not qualify the mention of a mere virus as ineffable as if this were a gothic melodrama. As a thoroughly modern man I acknowledge the necessity that I invoke the harsh banality of life as a naked truth. Although I now struggle to compare what the naked truth might be as compared to a fully-clothed version. Naked immediately sounds more appealing… The truth is that this pandemic could shake humanity to its knees… it has no sense of who we are. COVID-19 is a thing without any intelligence it does not know what it is… it cannot love or hate it is a dispassionate, inanimate, diminutive mass. It can be likened to a corrupted computer program acting out its instructions with dumb but lethal precision. As is our custom humans need to ascribe some tangible personality to abstract things that move us emotionally. So, it is a smart therapeutic exercise to humanize our fears, dressing them up for combat in armor that shows weaknesses giving them the appearance of vulnerability. It is only after we define our fears that we can attack them head on.

However poetic I have attempted to create a platform… a vantage point… a parallax from and through which to critique an otherwise invisible phenomenon. In my estimate COVID-19 is the very antithesis of life as perceived from the circus of a discotheque, (home-base and vantage point),… as viewed through the lens of a discophile, (the parallax). I am that discophile visualizing the entire enterprise from a happy place… the discotheque. Poised from the vantage of the dance floor I expect there is virtually nothing I cannot accomplish whilst sheathed in the  spangled armour of a disco ball… Y'all. To do so successfully I’ll need to set a more detailed atmosphere.

Every successful video game has a lavishly detailed landscape recreating the mood for mortal combat. Oddly enough there are no trendy cocktails that sufficiently capture COVID-19 ‘s ominous energy. No hot pulsing beats or piercing lyrics fierce enough to weave the equivalent of a virtual ligature around the neck of human society. No party-favors recalcitrant or stealthy enough to imitate its sudden and captivating explosion within the context of global culture. Perhaps the discotheque was not such a good setting or perhaps I was correct by noting COVID-19 is an almost alien phenomenon so far beyond the reckoning of what has been the human experience. It is a phenomenon that demands a new realness!

Its signature style is a reflection of humanities reaction to it.  It is become a tacky pret a porter video clip bewildering the runway with the likes of hospital masks and latex gloves… hardly the handsome hallmarks of an impeccably-dressed gentleman. But should there exist more fashionable ways to experience COVID-19 on the disco floor I fear I should still cancel the date! There are no redeeming qualities in COVID-19. But the question we must ask is should we fear this diminutive villain at all or brush it off as nothing more than a sadly-dressed charlatan?

The answer could be life-changing. We not only struggle to imagine life with this potentially virulent spectre but even more difficult is our capacity to envisage life after it. This is largely because the virus remains ever so distant and threatening to so many people. The climate it has brewed is so similar to the advent of AIDS. Ultimately, we wonder who will be marked by this silent horror as it begins to move-in unseen among us? Has it whisped by us innumerable times before after a random breath, sneeze or cough? How many such times shall we elude its poison mist! How long will its sojourn be and shall we ultimately survive it? Pandemics humble humanity because they defy our personal sense of strength and confidence. Our education, popularity, sexual prowess, piety or compassion are factors which have no power against a virus! This phenomenon will take Americans to places they have not been in the twenty-first century. That is why rather than stocking-up on canned food, water and toilet paper I’ve opted for whiskey and cigars! I recall hearing someone say, “There’s alcohol in alcohol!", and I smiled thinking they were certainly correct bless them because there is plenty of alcohol in liqour… but better to be tasted than used as a hand-wash. Actually I plan to stock up on liqour and cigars they are first on my list! Next upon my list of quarantine necessities is amazing sex!

It occurred to me that… should quarantines be imposed upon the cities of this country I should like to be sequestered with someone with whom I could enjoy cosmic sex! Interstellar-quality sex would certainly help pass the time like nothing else interspersed with great whiskey and excellent cigars!

If I ever feared that COVID-19 may have affected the way humans feel about sex I was right but who’d have known that it would send the human libido into overdrive? More sex is a manageable if not self-prescribed penance. I’ve not had so many sext-vitations in years! So that is the one redeeming quality of COVID-19… it may go down in history as having scared us humans into having better and more frequent sex!

One thing is certain… while we manage the mental and physical dynamics of COVID-19 the simple but essential comforts such as good food, conversation, libations, smoke and sex will sustain us. That is essentially why rather than living a life of fear I choose a lustier life o'er cocktails…

CHEERS!

WRITTEN BY BIGDADDY BLUES