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| 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!
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| 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
