Friends (united in Booze)

It's always nice to get an email from my friend Boots Frasilay, even when it's a catch-all mass broadcast shout out to all the folks back home in their respective warrens. I was a fool to ever worry about him - he is one of that rare (maybe unique) breed of human who adventures not for amusement or even out of physical need - like an adrenaline junkie, but because it is the Good life. It is a moral imperative, assigned by the God of examined living to explore the out of ordinary.

So it should come as no surprise that he is now loving life in Van City - the lotus of my eventual return. I wonder if I will sort things out as well as he has?

In the next few weeks he will take a canoe to the headwaters of the Milk River and travel to Regina in time for Fudgie's wedding there. How cool is that? It is a romantic dream that I always wanted to pursue (although I wanted to go all the way to New Orleans).

So here, is my paen to friendship - espcially the small but loyal cadre of hard-drinking, deep-thinking graduates of the Bunker.

I would spend all the time I posibly could with them, but for one simple, and powerful truth about the way we get together. Think on it : What is the one thing that has held the tenuous associations of our past and present endeavours together - the magical ingredient that sustains conversations, and improves long term memory while suppressing the inhibitions that are anathema to good times and orgiastic good times at that.

It is Booze. Boozing. We can't put two of us into a room without a bottle of something being cracked and consumed in the time it takes us to find our chairs and the easy ryhthm that is the hallmark of a good friendship. It goes on without me, and it happens whenever we reunite for a wedding, or whatever else might seem important enough to close the distance (geographic, psychic) between us. I can't do it anymore. I was never particularly famous for sheer fluid volume (especially in this group) but with the advancing years I find I can't even swill more than a few bottled domestic beers without coming over all queasy, and regretting the social mechanism that forces me to fatten my liver and tax my bankroll.

I am sure some day we will develop a taste for a snifter (maybe three) of cognac in a well furnished library with more wood than can be ethically justified by current planetary depredations, and by then, hopefully I will have someting interesting to tell them. Let me then renew my vow to devote as much time as I can to keeping our ties strong, and united in storytelling.