Published Issue 082, October 2020
Listen, big bottle of wine, you failed me. You were supposed to provide me with days of alcohol goodness with your plentiful liters of abundance. But instead, you lasted only three hours — two if you don’t count the 30 minutes it took to get you home from the liquor store and the 30 minutes it took to smoke that really big joint, since I also made that stop at the dispensary. (I won’t go into it here, but I did buy a big joint with the expectation that it would last longer than 30 minutes, but I digress … ) So anyway, how dare you lead me astray, big bottle of wine? How dare you not last the specific amount of time that I figured you would last when I bought you?
When I first encountered you at your previous home at the Liquor Mart across town, I was hopeful that I would find a bottle containing your ample liquid bounty. The thing is, I had been buying regular bottles of wine that disappear after just a few glasses. And that is simply inefficient. So I figured I would scour the store for something less fleeting. Alas, I found it! Apparently there’s an entire back of the store that I had never seen since I was always so eager to start grabbing the front-of-shop booze.
That’s where I found you standing so unassumingly on an end cap near the door with the “Employees Only” sign. I remember thinking, Now that there is one big ass bottle of wine! And then, after marveling at you, I thought, That big ass bottle would last me all week!
Simply bursting with anticipation, I took you home and showed you to my roommate.
“That there is one big ass bottle of wine!” she said.
“This big ass bottle of wine should last us all week!” I exclaimed.
Oh, how young and naive we once were.
Upon the first pour, we filled our glasses up to the brim, said, “Cheers,” and then tried to clink them together. Due to the aforementioned big joint we had just smoked, our glasses never connected because we were incredibly stoned. That didn’t stop us from trying and missing again. At that point, we figured we should probably just concentrate on drinking your innards.
And concentrate on your innards, we did! Ironically, we drank to quell our own emptiness, and in doing so, we contributed to yours. While that part is a little sad, (and probably metaphorical for how we all end up empty inside), I’m still angry at you. Angry as hell!!!
… Okay, okay. Maybe “angry” is too strong a word.
Actually, big bottle of wine, now that I think about it, maybe I’m not “angry” at you at all. Perhaps I’m just disappointed. I feel like your sizable appearance belied a promise that no bottle of wine could ever keep. For in the end, nothing lasts forever. Big joints get smoked. Big bottles of wine get drained. And even all-you-can-eat restaurants like Furr’s Cafeteria close down forever.
Oh well, big bottle of wine. Let’s remember the good times (that I have since forgotten because I drank you), shall we? And maybe next time I’ll get that big box of wine that was on the end cap across the aisle. That has to last at least a couple of days, right?
Brian Polk is a Denver-based writer, publisher of The Yellow Rake, and drummer for Joy Subtraction and Simulators. He’s the author of Placement of Character and Turning Failure into Ideology. He likes writing, muck raking, yellow journalism, zines not blogs, cheap booze and punk rock.