I have re-occurring dreams of profound loss, and of lostness. Not the usual human kind of familial lamentation, or even close friends lost to accident, drug overdose, and/or suicide. These dreams usually involve appearing somewhere I’ve never been with nothing but the clothes on my body, or the more involved versions which begin with long haul travel situations, far from home, and all of my possessions escape me in various manner and timing. While finding oneself on the wrong side of the fence between airport parking lot and runway (a jailable offense in most societies) is bad, and having no money, ID, or real idea where I am sets the stage, the denouement is inevitably the disappearance of my computer bag. Somehow the phone rarely enters into these dreams, but if present at all, it always goes long before the computer, without fanfare, and its loss pales in comparison.
You know how in dreams objects and events can hold outsized importance, and some things you don’t know why you know them but you do? Like you’re in a house you’ve never seen before, but your subconscious is telling you somehow that this place is familiar. When I had Covid (it was so early in the pandemic that I didn’t know it because I had little to no respiratory distress, no cough), I was in a deep sleep and dreamed that I was in my (long deceased) grandparents’ house in Oyster Bay, amongst a lavish cocktail party for hoards of elegant strangers. Imagine Mask of the Red Death, hosted in an upscale version of the Giger Alien mothership, if it were permanently docked in Gatsby’s West Egg, with just the slightest soupçon of steam punk pomp. Yeah, I know, I was in a dark place. I woke up with a start, gasping as if resurfacing from quicksand, with the bees from Candyman brawling it out in my lungs. I studied enough psychology (went to college planning to emerge a writer or a therapist) to know roughly what’s wrong with me, and I know how obvious the analysis is of this one. It’s not as two dimensional as showing up to class naked, but I used to have that one too, sometimes, back in the school days. So unless you’re a medical doctor, with a PhD in Psychology, and have studied the relevant works of John C. Lilly, Freud, Jung, Einstein, Robert Anton Wilson, Jean Beaudrillard, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I’ll be surprised if you can illuminate an angle here whose minutia I haven’t already examined. That is not a challenge… unless you have those aforementioned qualifications, in which case call me: 718.643.2250
I’m currently in a real life, slow motion, piecemeal version of one of those lost everything nightmares, as I type. While one of my oldest, dearest, and techiest friends stayed up all hours with me, double backing-up my computer’s data, wiping it clean (on the inside), and reinstalling and reformatting the whole damned thing, the other night (well, morning by the time we were done). The current situation isn’t great. There is a ton of missing data (though most should still be recoverable from one of the two back-ups), but with all of the crazy shit that is happening, it sure smells like a deep-seated virus and/or malware. On top of this, the necessary shift from Word to Pages has me feeling like a centenarian trying to navigate Twitch streams, or a Martian talking to a fungo. It’s also the little things. I find that I’m less tired during the day if I don’t actually know how little I’ve slept, so I like to set my alarm for the morning and then switch the clock in the corner of the display to analog for the evening. I used to accomplish this by clicking on the clock in the menu bar and switching from digital. Now that same action requires this lengthy negotiation: opening System Preferences, selecting ‘Dock & Menu Bar’, scrolling down to and selecting ‘Clock Menu Bar’, and switching ‘Time Options’ from digital to analog. It’s reached the point where it takes concerted effort to not wish deeply hateful shit on every single human working for/with Apple, Microsoft, whoever hacked and destroyed my personal website, and whatever entity is responsible for the malware ravaging my digital life. Apologies to the first two, some of you are friends. But if any of you know the asshole responsible for the clock thing, you tell them to change it back. I know it’s hard to justify your job around so many smart competitive minds, but you’re causing real harm out here in the desert of the real. Stop fixing shit that isn’t broken! Get a hobby or something. Christ.
So, we’re putting a bunch more “new SKUs” from Empire which add to our total and help us get the most limited American whiskeys. In case you missed the last one, I’ll paste that explanation below, and once again, all bottles are for sale at $2 above our cost! And while the Jack Daniels, Bushmills (turns out these don’t count toward the SKU total), and Woodford are there for SKU raising purposes, most of the other whiskeys we intend to carry regardless. And the Milam & Green whiskeys are particularly worth checking out.
Here’s the SKU game explanation from before: “The vast majority of whiskey that anybody has ever heard of comes through the two largest distributors in our market, Southern and Empire. With the latter, access to the very rarest and most sought after items (Pappy, Stagg, barrel program single barrels) often depends on one’s SKU count of total whiskeys from this distributor, and we have no choice but to play the game. So besides products to which we are morally opposed (looking at you, dollar shots of Peanut Butter Whiskey) and those we simply can’t afford (looking at you- longingly- Dalmore 33 year), we try and grab as many of said total whiskeys as possible once per year to keep our SKU total competitive. But since I also spend other people’s money the way I spend my own, I’m incapable of picking up a small number of bottles from a big brand that are available at a much lower price (at much higher volume), so we often grab mixed packs which allow us to pay the lowest possible price, without committing to a year worth of those items. So, here are a handful of those, and a couple others for which we have no shelf space all offered at TWO DOLLARS above cost. This is neither a joke nor a drill. $2 more than we just paid on every bottle on the below hidden sale page. Click away!”
