Truesday: Everything Will Always Continue

But after having had a couple shots of the stuff in an extremely dingy, orange-lit bar in Prague, it soon became apparent that everything I had imagined the experience would be was simply that: imagined. In fact, all it ended up doing was getting me pretty damned hammered. And instead of bursting with the spectacular flavor of unadulterated artistic inspiration, it tasted like more like mouthwash. Spoiled mouthwash. Perhaps mouthwash which had been filtered through the crack of a hooker’s ass.

I staggered back to my hostel without much in the way of events (beyond some tame public urination and perhaps an impromptu NWA a capella or two). That was it. Much ado about nothing.

Big let-down, actually. Most of the following day was overshadowed by the hang over, but that was just covering up my disappointment. The Fairy let me down. Lautrec was a fraud. Oscar Wilde’s muse was a ruse. Van Gogh was just fucking crazy. Sadness washed over me like a mass of plague rats.

It’s rather strange how expectations are built up. More often than not, they’re based in some alternate reality where everything and everyone’s interests revolve around the single individual (or group) who is building those expectations. In the case of absinthe: ME. As if their (my) needs trump those of the entire universe. Folly (genius).

But this is how politics works, right? Isn’t a “positive campaign” simply one where politicians out-promise with empty rhetoric rather than out-bash one another with hate-shaded rhetoric? Don’t we call that “sticking to the issues” rather than “slinging the mud”? In order to motivate people to swap regimes (whether party or policy), voters have to be given the sense that 1) they are not currently empowered, so things MUST change or else there will be DOOM, and 2) they will be empowered and thwart DOOM if only they get up off their ass and support a specific candidate or cause. Once elections or referendums are held and a decision is made, the backpedaling inevitably begins. Because the promises were little more than fancy flying kites, described and put aloft by political dreamers who may have had the best of intentions in the sales pitch, but the worst of ethical compasses in the plan mapping.

So how does one maintain hope amidst a crisis of common confidence? Well, in terms of what I actually know and understand: eventually I settled into an appreciation of the absurd alcohol content provided by absinthe, and traded the idea of sweet world-expanding psychotropics for that of hallucinations-by-way-of-impending-liver-failure. So you can cling to the dream, or you can take the necessary steps toward acceptance and some sweet ass alcoholism.

Whichever’s most available, I say. In fact, I recommend absinthe for all ills and ails. It totally causes hallucinations. Hope on THAT.