DoppelBacchanalia: The Sixth Annual Bootlegger's Bliss is Almost Upon Us......

"The majority of wines, almost all spirits, and every one of the beers whose memory I have evoked here have today completely lost their tastes — first on the world market and then locally — with the progress of industry as well as the disappearance or economic re-education of the social classes that had long remained independent of large industrial production, and so too of the various regulations that now prohibit virtually anything that is not industrially produced. The bottles, so that they can still be sold, have faithfully retained their labels; this attention to detail provides the assurance that one can photograph them as they used to be, not drink them." 
—Guy Debord, "Panegyric - Volume I" (1989)
"Suffering results from constraint. A portion of pure delight, no matter how tiny, will hold it at bay.  To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection."
—Raoul Vaneigem, "The Revolution of Everyday Life"
"Sooner barbarity than boredom."
—Theophile Gautier


This then, is it.  Again.

Fall returns. Leaves renounce their lofty perch and drift (dérive! dérive!) like wayward angels to the waiting earth.  The air, cool and crisp and clean, beckons smoke from blackened chimneys.  Autumn skies whisper elegies to summer evenings past.  The moon is a melancholy mirror.

And the dirt in Pennsylvania, the very dirt to which we all return one day, is already like poison in the wound.*

Now is the season when the Bliss reigns supreme.  Post-Halloween, pre-Thanksgiving, its timing is nothing if not divine.  And this year is different.  This year, the preternatural power of the Bliss to renounce the anhedral, stultifying grip of modern culture is two-fold.  The late, great Terrence McKenna, in speaking of hallucinogens, said, "When in doubt, double the dose."  Indeed.  The Bliss, second to no substance in its herculean ability to transcend the ordinary, to burn the paper throne beneath the ego's bloated ass, to rouse the sinful spirit from the plastic puppet that dutifully bends to the might of the moneyed marionettes, the Bliss, the Bliss is racing toward you on a fat-tired tandem, and over its shoulder can be seen a diabolical double, a dastardly doppelgänger, a querulous Quilty to the hapless Humbert at the helm, leering and drooling and laughing maniacally.  And hell-bent on destruction.

This, my friends, is going to be good.  Stay tuned.

*With profound apologies to the Potentate of Parody, the Prince of Prose, Vladimir Nabokov.