by Al Drinkle
It was 8:00 a.m. and I was out in the sun raking the dead grass out of my lawn. Wearing a T-shirt with an image of Baudelaire and the slogan "Get Drunk” emblazoned upon it, and applying myself to the lifelong pursuit of comprehensive ear damage by blasting nauseatingly catchy '60s girl-group pop through my headphones, I dragged my green bin around the yard collecting the little piles of debris. I was even relatively well-rested and amidst this exceptionally domestic and mundane activity, I almost forgot how weird life has become.
“Quotidian” is a great word which means “of or occurring every day”, or “ordinary or routine, especially when mundane”. In the past I didn't make much use of it, but I find that now the word turns up in all my writing. It's been unintentionally ubiquitous in my poetry, and even when I'm texting with my mom, I write that not much is new and that my activities have been reduced to quotidian details. You could say that my use of "quotidian” has become quotidian, just like my life. You know you’re too deep in routine when raking grass out of your grass provides you with a warped sense of exhilaration.
My covid-era self reminds me of my unpopular teenage self. I seek refuge in outsider artistic expressions on the screen, the page and the airwaves, and I do mean refuge. When dreams and daylight musings alike are haunted, not by fears of illness, but of an incapacity to aptly navigate the world that we presently live in, one seeks escapism of other means. My teenage self’s phone never rang, and my covid self tends to ignore his. And though both of us are fully immersed in vivid films, existential literature and rebel music of various forms, the current me knows something that my teenage self didn’t; namely that all these things, and my quotidian engagement with them, is eminently improved by the enlightening effects of wine.
A good wine can serve as a vinous postcard from a beautiful place. But a great wine is a liquid love letter, saturated with the secrets of an enchanted land. It's a lucid daydream of spellbinding clarity, resplendent in aroma and flavour and propounding more questions than answers. It's a teleportive elixir, escorting you not to its place of origin, but to mystic environs where gossamer wisps of melancholy flit fitfully through waterfalls of transcendence and sunbeams of elation. Great wine doesn't so much banish sorrow, as Hugh Johnson would have it, as it reconstitutes the universe, reminding us that we're just infinitesimal specks of stardust; but specks whose hearts embody the universe itself.
We all need this right now. As both the healthy and the ill continue this pseudo-existence of social distancing and self-quarantine, escapism at its most comprehensive could be the preeminent guardian of sanity… and we’ve got it by the bottle.
I don't think that it's possible to thank you enough for your continued support during these bewilderingly quotidian times. We are honoured to be your provider of this most essential of services as we all do our best to make our way through. Thank you.
