NEEDLING

Waking up feeling like a retarded pancake. The neighbor’s dog is barking away at some ghost. There was, thank god, a glass of wine left in the bottle from last night. The days are too long, I don’t remember the half of them, certainly not dialogue, conversations, and what have you. They jumble together and whiff away into the fogginess of my brain. It’s a disenchantment of sorts, a forgetting of life lived, a putting away into space of nothing. Black hole is better than remembering. I know nothing. I see nothing. I hear nothing. Or however that diddle goes. I am merely a body flowing through time, space and matter. The rest is all illusions gone away for the sake of my survival and for the sake of my sanity.

Bought a wine cooler yesterday with money I don’t have. I placed three bottles of wine in there. A 1999 Chambolle-Musigny by Alain Hudelot-Noellat, a 1997 Echezeaux Grand Cru by Louis Jadot, and a 1999 Gevrey-Chambertin by Louis Latour. The cooler can hold 52 bottles all together, so I've got a ways to go.

Why did I buy this appliance? The domino effect, probably. I’m a sucker for it. First, there was a bottle of 1988 Mouton-Rothschild. The bottle was at my friends' place. We were, incredibly enough, talking about wine. The subject among many other turns and derailments, landed on me saying that I’d like to own a wine cooler. I don't know why I said this. I just did. In the moment of that instant, I completely forgot how broke I am, how much money I all ready owe the bank, and imagined through the soft fuzzy butterfly effect of the Mouton, myself strolling the French country side buying futures at various chateau's. The idea popped into my head and attached itself like a leech. Such ideas, those of ownership of appliances, are very much a part of our consumerist society. In no way is this new cumbersome part of my estate necessary for my survival as a human being. Yet, for several weeks, it grew and grew until I finally bowed down to it and thought I couldn't go on with life unless I went to the store and made this purchase which will further me into financial destitution.

I don’t regret the purchase, I’m rather happy about it, however, now that the deed is done, I can clearly see that I was tricked by my own silliness. I could have saved myself a lot of money by not buying this wine cooler, and instead paid off part of my credit card bill, gone out for a beer, and drank somebody else's wine.

After the first initial conversation, I started talking about it at work . My manager said it was a great idea. My colleague said I shouldn't spend that kind of money. My manager said I should go to Home Depot, tthat they have some wine coolers on clearance sale. That bit of information was stored in the far reaches of my brain, and then promptly forgotten. My colleague surfed a few web-sites and showed me some wine stores, told me I should surf e-bay and so on. My manager said I should never buy a second hand wine cooler. I changed the conversation and we talked about the sexiness of our female customers, specially those forty something women who haven't had any face lifts or breast jobs and still look awesome.

A couple of weeks later, my colleague told me: Hey man, I was just at Home Depot, they have a 52 bottle wine cooler on clearance sale. That little bit of information was stored in the back of my brains, yet closer to home control, linking myself back into the forgotten department. Two days later, my Mouton friends at whose place this whole ordeal had started comes in and says to me: Hey Francois, I was just at Home depot where I purchased a wine cooler, you should check it out, they’re some pretty good sales going on right now.

That was the grabber. The rule of three’s. The next day I drove to Home Depot and bought a wine cooler. Now it’s sitting right behind my desk with my three lonely bottles on its racks. And me thinking, what else can I put in there? We've got 12 cases of this really good 2000 Cru Bourgeois arriving in a couple of weeks. Both my colleague and my manager are keeping a case each. Why shouldn't I do the same? Buy on credit. The American way of life!

It’s morning. Wine has been drunk. Wine has been stored. Wine all around. My ideas are foggy. My life is disappearing behind veils of red wine. I stare out the window and see the leaves on the ground which need to be raked. It’s time I got up and did something. I dream of opening a whiskey distillery. I collect single malt scotches, all ready breaking my finances to hell, and there I go again, and force myself into the wine collecting business when just a few days ago, I promised myself I’d start collecting American whiskies only. What the hell is the world coming to? I step off an airplane and kiss the ground. Barley and grapes everywhere. Fields of corn and rye stretching as far as the eyes can see. Hill sides of vineyards barely surviving on chalky grounds. Four seasons of gods and goddesses. I am the messenger of blur. Fuzzy snow on your tv screen. Embrace the harvest, embrace the moon cycle. I want to dig in the dirt with my hands, my nails breaking through the earth. I want to smell the shit which feeds the vine and the grains.