Cause it will. It probably already has. This is the way of the world. Nothing you can do about it except find a quiet place to knock back a glass of high-quality whiskey and cry.
Music is important in a time like this. Of course, it depends on why you’re crying. It depends on what part of your life has picked itself up and walked off. Maybe you got fired. Maybe your friend five states away who drums for a living is suffering from a broken rotator cuff that’s going to keep him down for six months and he might lose his job and his wife is leaving him and there’s nothing you can do about it. Maybe you oversalted your gumbo. It’s all relevant. You need music that speaks not to your sadness, it’s doing fine all by itself. You need music that speaks to your resilient self, to your inner phoenix. You need Sinatra. You need Junior Kimbrough. You need All Them Witches. You need whiskey.
The whiskey isn’t there to get you drunk. The whiskey’s there to provide a touchstone to those things that are more permanent, to those systems of the world, those arts, that fly high over the middling concerns of your day. Good whiskey takes a minute. It swims slowly around in its barrel. It keeps its ear open for the heat words of the rickhouse, eyes lurid with an amber fire, pinned not on the day when they’ll swirl into the neck of the bottle or out, but decades further down when it’s learned everything there is to know about oak and char, and its soul has turned saffron and umber; until it smells like all the longest sentences of an old library book; until it can fly.
The whiskey is there to remind you not with a platitude but with the fact of itself, with the eight years it took to get into this glass in your fist that this too shall pass. That you will eventually rise from this chair, from this stool at the end of the bar, and open the narrow door to let a solidly argent shaft of sunlight slice through the darkness of the room, and walk out. Back to your life. Back to your routine. Back to worrying about ROI and kerning the margins of your P&L sheets like Minnesota Fats lining up a shot.
The whiskey is a beacon of honey-colored light that draws you forward into the simple luxury of a thing well done. It shines a silver path toward that moment when you’ll be lost deep in headphones’ ambient well, debugging code; you’ll lift your hands off the keys to arch them together, to rub those rusty knuckles and take a breather and you’ll look out the window into your yard at nothing and suddenly you remember this moment, this fatuous fabu. In that moment, this slanderous wombat fart of a day will be faint and gray and indistinct, misplaced behind the divergence of your subsequent days, thinned by the aureate light beaming through an exquisite bottle of whiskey.
Which whiskey should you drink when it all goes to hell? Ask the devil, kid. Ask the Lord.
