crystal shot glasses

when the. gunfire had ceased and the invaders had been vanquished, the leaders found themselves almost alone in the palace of the dead Tsar and Tsarina, a palace now finitely desolate, He came across his fellow Russian drinking Polish vodka with his English friend, who offered him a glass. The crystal glass made it possible. for him to be distracted, allowed his doubts to be set aside in this momentary pause in the midst of silent chaos. They were. also smoking silently. While they drink and smoke we can feel an affinity with them, for they are part of the long line of people living on the edge of finitude which unlike history is not hostile. It’s a community that we form with all those who drink and smoke in the act of resisting the finite, outside a cafe, at a bus stop, or on a train late at night, perhaps we are listening to an owl singing in the woods. We are no different with our amorous partners in crime. whose sipping of vodka entrances us, at night on a public square with the crystal shot glasses she produces from her magical bag, which somehow makes the night darker and which makes the pleasure of drinking. more serious — is that a French cigarette. being slowly savored 170 centimetres above the ground as it floats across the square or something more banal ? As we push the cork into the the the bottle and place the glasses back into her bag and wander across the square to go inside the hotel, the other humans standing alongside the road watch and cheer the marathon runners as they run through the square, they are supposedly making the world a better place to live in, but we are not convinced […] The universe is overpopulated, the bar tables, the tables in the restaurant are overflowing with things things things, unwilling to accept more dishes until the remnants of earlier visitors have been cleared away. Like the dishes of sand outside of the cafe waiting for the remains of still burning cigarettes and cigars. The cleaners. working on the last shift will stand by the dish and cursing the smokers empty it of the extinguished butts and replenish the sand. The rubbish is collected by the council from bags they leave on the side of the street beneath the plane trees. In the feared and primitive future, the curvature of space causes the return of the photons that are emitted by the noise of the present, a weak half-life of the consequences of human actions. If they could analyse the images they would see some walk casually through the shadows of events, past the statues in squares, the photons striking their bodies and eyes, perhaps a cigarette in their mouths, others leaning against the pop-up bar on the square sipping shots of clear liquids from Korea. A man explaining to another the supremacy of Scotch to Irish whiskey. In this moment. people were very diligent. at drinking in these balmy summer evenings. They had spent the day in offices, factories, rooms in which they were expected to behave as if they were rational. Only now in the afterwards they were poisoning themselves with the abandon of irrational beings believing in their immunity from the poisons they love… The Englishman smiled, the countries we grew up in are like prison camps, those who who wait on the margins of the cities, drinking and smoking in the suburbs, are related to those who in the east standing on the edge of the desert holding onto their cigarettes as they plant trees to try and halt the inexorable advance of human caused deserts , as they dig they put the extinguished cigarette behind their right ear, behind them they can hear the planters advance, the artificial rain falls… The worst the Russian said are those who during the everyday searches made us give up cigarettes, offering us a scented moist substitute instead. Most will eventually surrender to the social pressure, it takes only a faintest hint of mortality to feel threatened by your pleasures and desire. The soft glug of vodka being poured into the glasses. When this is over and we once again putting the remains of our cigarettes into the ashtrays, we will leave the cafe on our way back home. and we will be feeling guilty for drinking and smoking. Eventually we will only be allowed to stand outside and ostrichize our heads in the sands of yesterdays pleasures and pains. We will always have one another, drinking together, growing old, resisting the torments of the world through our crystal shot glasses, and being there is to resist the daylight and instead to live in the shadows and as I stand with you against the. paranoid psychotics who run the world, despairing of the police and the suits, singing your dreams and then, well then, as i finish sipping the red vodka in the glass, which describes a perfect parabolic arc from lips to bar, I have an overwhelming desire to drink some more whilst dreaming of chaos…