Thursday, July 10, 2008

Another Bottle Brings Another Day

Another thursday has come and gone mates, although I write this from amongst the goings on of that night, and I hope it was pleasant for all of you. Although I made it an early night, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I am happy to have been able to introduce a new drink to your repetoir. It is seldom I get to introduce new things to old salts, and it pleased me greatly.


When I was a boy, not more than fifteen, my brothers told me that if I continued to drink I was going to die. They said that if I didn't stop now the Lord God was going to take one of his famous ass kickings from out of his huge bag of ass kickings and hand one down to me. That my liver would give out and I would see the devil himself at the bottom of a bourbon glass before he took me to the place where souls are forgotten. I suppose the fact that I've outlived them all sort of put the cork in their asses didn't it?
Maybe I can make fun of them when I finally escape this walking corpse and die. If that was possible.

In all honesty I've outlived everyone I know. My wife and children, their children and the children that came after them. I've watched great-great grandchildren grow old in my front yard just to die of cancer in the hospital sixty years later. Every one of them calls me uncle, calls me cousin, never knowing that I'm really just a relic. Cousins and Uncles have a purpose, they can be capable of giving a shit about you. A relic just sits there and molds. A relic just acts as a reminder that there was a time before you existed and now no longer does. Its history. I'm history. Jesus.

I suppose I can't be bitter about living as long as I have. I've known a lot of men who have gone kicking and screaming to the gates of God. Men who have spit up blood on their wives while they are consumed from the inside out by age or plague or whatever the fuck kills people these days. I've seen men begging to be spared, sputtering at the hospital bed or the side of the road that it isn't their time. It couldn't possibly be them that has to go right now. But it always is their time, never mine. Maybe some day I'll go sputtering into hell, but I'd have to find something that can stop me first.