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December December
Many moons ago ... 1982 in fact, Tasmania was beset by a behemoth outbreak of bushfires. Being young, unemployed and living quite close to one of the major outbreaks, I did what many did and undertook some volunteer duty fighting the fires. I was assigned to a "mopping up" operation, which basically required voluntarily killing myself slowly and painfully in ridiculously agonising ways for the greater good.
These days I mercifully work in an airconditioned "essential service", so when bushfires are raging, as they again at the moment, the worst that happens is that I lose my voice through countless phone calls and get a little dizzy running back and forth when such methods prove more effective than the phone system. Such was the case today.
And I tell you all that merely to explain this evening's incredible thirst. A day in such conditions renders me almost incomprehensibly desirous of strong beer. And today's strong beer of choice was Chimay Cinq Cents (Chimay White). Such a beer simultaneously renders one incomprehensible to anyone within earshot and satisfies the need to shut down one's brain in a pleasant "smother me to death with a tantalisingly bitter/sweet-aftertaste, but also bludgeon me with a high alcoholic content" kind of way.
I really shouldn't drink Chimay. Chimay is the closest thing to alcoholism I have yet encountered, and I suspect it's only the exorbitant price of the stuff that rescues me from the inevitable. Erm, actually that kind of negates my argument ... let's just say that there is a remarkable and quite natural self-regulating system that keeps me from attaining the nirvana of beerdom... which raises some really interesting relativity questions regarding nirvana and all things paradisical (if there is such a word). I feel quite sure there is a theology in alcohol if I could only remain sober enough to investigate it with sufficient thoroughness...
Anyway, I mention all this only because I can't auto-correct slurred speech, but the software does a half-reasonable job of auto-correcting my typos, and ever since I learned how to shut down the auto-grammar correction, almost (but not quite) completely and utterly fails to pulverise my syntax.
So, that's my excuse for not doing my scheduled run this evening... a superbly fantastic beer got in the way, and given the savage loss of property and the excruciating impact on the lives of those poor bastards in the path of the fires, which by strange and in largely torturously incomprehensible ways impacted my own life today, meant that the treadmill lay cool and quiet, in direct conflict with the schedule I had assigned it and myself for this evenings apres emploi quotidien.
For all their faults (and we won't mention the Congo), the Belgians make superb beer... and that is enough.
I must go ... the room is spinning too crazily to type.
Melancholy Man.
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December December
