Tip the Bottle (Some nights that's all you can do)

Tip the bottle, fill the glass. Clean shirts hanging in the closet, fat oranges in the fruit bowl, a stack of bills on the kitchen table, ground beef from New Zealand in the fridge. Woman on the radio says soybean oil isn’t natural, not good for us, and commonly used in all sorts of processed foods. The water beneath our feet is contaminated and the air isn’t fit to breathe. I don’t know if everything that dies one day comes back. Is the city of Detroit coming back? Are the jobs of industrial America coming back, and dragging a new middle class with them? Or is all that buried under rubble? Sequester your dreams. Those smooth-talking fucktards in DC bent us over and shoved it in; the little people will suffer most, they always do. Meanwhile, Senator William P. Dickwad collects his government paycheck and hops on a Gulfstream bound for sunny Miami. Some wealthy donor will hand him a check, line up a couple of quality hookers or a young Cuban lad, ply him with top-shelf liquor and tell him what a patriotic American he is, a credit to the republic. This must be vertigo -- everything is upside down and inside out, spinning, out of balance; failure is rewarded and virtue is punished. God is summoned when needed and ignored when not. In the big houses on the hill the lights are burning bright. Life is good up there; the gates are sturdy, the walls thick, and the roof tiles fireproof. Tip the bottle, fill the glass, more cheap wine from Trader Joe’s. Sangiovese. Sounds like the name of a Mafioso from Sicily. You got a toast for me? Here’s to the revolution, may it arrive before it’s too late. I should read some Henry Miller, lose myself in his mystical mind. Henry called America the air-conditioned nightmare. Way back in the early 1940’s, Henry saw what was coming – saw the wars and the greed, the concentration of power and wealth, the abject cowardice of the ruling class and the surrender of the numbed masses. Henry didn’t give a shit about politics; he only wanted to paint and write, create and dream. He wanted to live his finite moments, breathe the air, feel the sunshine on his back. “To paint is to love again,” said Henry. His Paris days were far behind, the whores grown old and ugly; copies of Tropic of Cancer were smuggled across the prudish American border. The sky is clear and the stars are mocking our planet. Can you feel the love tonight? Yeah, I’m losing it now, my hand slips from the tiller. Maybe we’re all crazy and the world is a giant asylum. The bottle’s almost empty. My advice: find the magic wherever you can -- in the bottom of a glass, in a deck of cards, in a pair of dice, in the pew, in the next wave, in the garden, in a ’66 VW bug, in the woods, in the Mojave desert, in your lover’s eyes, in guitar strings, in the sound of silence.