Boulette de Viande!: One Nation, Indivisible, With Liberty And Justice For All

Boulette de Viande!: One Nation, Indivisible, With Liberty And Justice For All

Drink like this.

The other night, with friends, over several captain and diets (or was it jack and diets? One can’t be sure when so many liquors mixed with bad aftertaste diet cola are consumed in succession) I said: “why are we partying like this? Wait a minute, I think I know.”

One of my friends, a feisty, temperamental litigator, shook his head vigorously, as if reading my mind.

“Because we’re escaping. We’re all escaping.”

Simple enough. But even in the escaping, we’re not really escaping, we’re examining. Keenly.

Within so much honesty, the conversations become more animated, more and more open, as we all reveal our fears and doubts, the anxious thoughts that keep us up at night, and those wonderful, brief states of denial and euphoria found in a collective sensibility about the fragile state of our world, of our culture, of the unraveling fabric of our society (is it really unraveling or has it always been this way?), and our ignorance not to be confused with our apathy.

From tornadoes to tsunamis, from sound investments to profound losses, from so many overworked and underpaid, from others having no work at all, from the majority of us hiding behind the crumbling façade of our former so-called success yet we’re now hanging by a taut thread, doing all we can to keep it together, to keep our minds from unraveling too: this is what's haunting us. And so we hit the liquor store and we drink like this. And sometimes we dance till we sweat, and we laugh because we can and we need to, and because among the safety of friends, we can tell it all.

The following morning, in the confines of our own abodes, in the early light of day before all the reality smacks us in the face again, in the silence that follows all the confessions of the previous evening, we go on about our lives, at first quietly, at first reasonably, until the mid-day pours out all over us, in its shiny, optimistic gleaming as is the norm here in Florida, as if so much sun should indicate so much prosperity and easiness. But, instead, it becomes a representation, even further, of the fake-it-till-we-make-it smiles we plaster across our uneasy faces all day long. For our clients. For our colleagues. For ourselves.

All that sunshine and all those lost daydreams remind us of seemingly simpler  times, and the persuasive lazy palms in the late afternoon, almost---almost---wash our cares away. Drink like this and your worries will fall away, if only for a moment or two.

Drink like this and, if nothing else, we’ll share this.