Drink in the Sun

“Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.”

― G.K. Chesterton

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Dear Kate,

Just hand-washed my son's McDonald's work clothes and shoes.  Actually did that last night close to midnight, for he got coffee and stuffs all over himself when finishing off his last task before I picked him up.

He was taking out a big plastic bag of trash to a big bin outside, the big bag's big mouth can never be properly bagged up, he said, for the customers have the appetite to keep stuffing trash in beyond the limit, the capacity, the respectability of the receptacle.

He, the magician who's supposed to make the bad vanish and middle-class-hood great again, runs out of tricks to convince himself such work entails at least a semblance of dignity and human flourishing: everybody's in a for a lousy dollar to answer to some low-grade desire, and that's the proximate goodness we must all settle with in this mass society.  We are all drunk on something, and the drink is not always soft.

Last night I soaked the clothes, which smelled like a newly sanitized public toilet with an unsubtle suggestion of fast-food urine, baptized them with water that walked through fire, and just now took them out to greet a Sun-day.  To say the sun is our original dryer is to state an obvious, useful fact; to believe redemption is nigh is to smell ahead to the promise of the last summer sun--Thanksgiving.

It's a cloudy day, beckoning us to reconsider our ways.  I think I will do some lawn work this afternoon.

Yours, Alex