Clockwork Beer

The path at our feet, even those stretches of it that are usually hard as ice, was soft as fish guts. It had been a rain hard as Glimpy's candy balls. Just another winter's day in Dope City.

After the rain was done it had cooled off. It was now no more than one degree. Small white snowflakes, one of nature's many deathly perfections, finished their lonesome travel to our planet swirling beside us like drunken square dance polar bears as we walked.

The cold air and the soft footing encouraged my dog to run more than she usually does. She dove in and out of the meadows, the water and the woods, high as a crackhead in an evidence room. "You only live once Beer," she seemed to be saying to me, "and I am not going to fuck that up."

The mountain we were walking with exploded with water like Canada explodes with people who like to blow it out on Saturday night. It was so wet I had to concede it was possible the mountainside might just come undone and crush my dog and I like the toe of a policeman's shiny black boot meeting an unprotected face.

I took my flask of Glen Breton from my coat, the stainless steel cold in my hand. The whisky, my needle, my generous friend, warmed me like the end.     

On the way home I had to visit my pharmacist. I needed some pills. I placed my order then I sat down and waited. I felt kind of old and sickly, sitting there waiting all by myself, looking at all the medicine on the shelves. I hoped I did not have that old man smell of urine and suicides contemplated and forgotten. I wondered if I would feel any younger and less sickly if I pulled out my phone and started fucking around with it.

I did.

I watched and listened to Susan Boyle perform Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" as my pharmacist counted out my pills. Not June 1, 1974 brilliant, but snowblind brilliant nevertheless. Maybe today had not been perfect but it had been close, close enough for an old dirty ass rock 'n' roll motherfucker like me.

Then my thoughts turned to what it would be like to fuck Susan Boyle. Really smash her ass. "Too bad," I thought as the fuck cinema in my head flickered in the dark, "the English are not much good at fucking anybody but the Irish."