Wine (Part VI)

I'm amazed by how long it's been and how quickly we just picked up and I had you pegged. I had you pegged on about the second pitcher just as the jukebox was coming to a chorus, having just ended a rather uncreative crescendoing bridge. And then I realized we'd spend the rest of the evening in a mildly fictional haze, getting stopped in Chinatown for being white and starving and begging for soup and karaoke, playing trivia computers and wondering whether we'd get static shocked, walking the empty streets with bladders full and contrasting the tranquil but sad bus station with the exuberant but boring outside. I saw you inhale those gallons and heard your tales of the exploits and loveless sexual webs you had woven over south-eastern Ontario. Perhaps they were fetid sexual webs; perhaps you threw up secretly in an old lady's bonnet; maybe I could have encapsulated all this in a quote, but it escaped me as the wind blew down the front of my jacket and polaris blinked out threough the overcast for just an instant and I dreamt of Ursa Minor and hoped I'd get to see the big trackless north before the boreal forests get gutted by loggers and global warming. Had I met the love of my life last noght I would have to spent the next forty years crying. How's that for hyperbole? And then I got sad and paranoid when I saw some people re-enact the Sino-Soviet rift in their microcosmic little way and I thought: "there go two magnificent but unintelligible cultures going at it: drink up!". And I might have drunk up or I might have waffled; I've really needed the drink and hear this: nobody is immune: cultured or hard-working or brilliant or lucky or attractive--nobody is immune from something that eats away at self-esteem. D.T. said that if he ever got a tattoo and it was the slightest bit asymmetrical he would pick at it until he got it infected and died. Every day there is something new from this fellow; I acted as his guru for a little while but now he can be the Bodhisattva phrasebook. ("Bodhisattva" is a beautiful, if somewhat meaningless, plaudits-giving adjective that I've overused, I realize.)

Consider: "Alcohol is involved in 70% of snowmobile deaths."