Ya Know Free Rangers,
We are very lucky to enjoy the readers here that we have. And it has always brought a chuckle that more people check in to so see how I’m doing when the latest note reads as what this machine considers positive, and it is always appreciated. But it seems that perhaps things were getting a little too dark on the virtual page when a perfect stranger came into the shop as a new customer, saying that she had been forwarded a shop e-mail from a friend. Very sincerely and gingerly, she asked if I was okay. As in all other things, giving a shit goes a long way, and yes, we here are surviving and thriving due largely to the awesomeness of our people, and the loveliness of your four legged friends. Unrelated to anything else, friends of the prose will find beneath pertinent upcoming events and sales (well, one of each really), my favorite paragraph (which most teachers, professors, and editors will agree should be two or three or four paragraphs).
Holy crow, it’s a big one this week. The in-store tasting program re-launches with a visit from our old pal, Roy, who will be pouring (at least) three delicious Oregon wines by long time friend of the shop, André Mack. Besides being one of the finest mass communicators in the food and wine space in this country, his wines have graced our shelves for about as long as we’ve been a thing. His Oregogne Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are consistently exemplary of one of our favorite regions on Earth.
Please join us this Thursday, February 3rd (5-7pm) for FREE tastes of Maison Noir Oregogne Chardonnay 2019, Maison Noir Oregogne Pinot Noir 2021, and the deep, dark, enigmatic non-vintage beast that is Horseshoes And Handgrenades. Enjoy 10% off these wines, or 20% off 6+ bottles (mix & match) in-store on tasting day!
And now, this: ’Roll Back the Clock’ pricing Part 5!
The latest installment of our Roll Back the Clock pricing series features an old classic Bourbon that has long become a supply and demand rarity of which we didn’t receive a single bottle through the proper channels for multiple years in the middle: Hancock’s Single Barrel Bourbon! Here’s how it works: Buy any bottle from the page linked below to get 1 bottle of Hancock’s Single Barrel Bourbon @ $75 (usually $149) automatically added to your cart.
* limit 1 per customer.
(!) Click here for Hancock’s Bourbon sale (!)
And here’s a deep cut from the personal archives, excerpted from The Genuine Article:
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I’m stuck. I go to the texts. I certainly wasn’t the first kid to eat a handful of mushrooms and crank out a pile of pages, the first was a fella named Huxley whose Doors of Perception, as well as being a singular seminal moment in the crossroads of drug culture and literati in this country, is also in the pile of books I brought along as potential resource: The First Perennial Library paperback edition, published 1970, of Aldus Huxley’s 1954 classic trip. Also in the stack are HST’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, The Great Shark Hunt, The Curse of Lono, and Hey Rube as well as Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, John C. Lilly’s Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, George Orwell’s 1984, Gore Vidal’s Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, and E.R. Bloomquist’s notorious paperback, Marijuana. I took from the pile the Huxley book and opened it at random to a page and I read Huxley telling how he took down his copy of Evans-Wentz’s edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and opened it at random to a page and read this line: “O nobly born, let not thy mind be distracted.” The line is in reference to what the Book of the Dead calls the Clear Light. Huxley noted that this was the problem, to remain undistracted. What was so important about Huxley was that he had already been a man of legitimate literary import (since he wrote Brave New World in four months in 1931) when he decided to ingest four-tenths of a gram of mescaline dissolved in a half a glass of water and subject himself to observation and questioning and then write a book about it. But Huxley was a hell of lot nobler than I, and amongst my other distractions of Tibetan proportions was the sight of my Therapist returning again, wet from the pool, and sunning in front of the cabana. Distractions in deed. Every paragraph, every phrase, every word, every pained longing glance are streaked the with the distractions of fear and humiliation and regret and poolside chili-cheese-dogs and love and loss and remorse and judgment and rejection and bullshit fatalism. Huxley further notes that what those Buddhist monks did for the dying- helped the mind to be undistracted from the intended meditation- was similar to the services rendered by modern shrinks to the insane. But I was never medically certified and Huxley never saw my Therapist in that mismatched bikini; a one of kind porcelain doll, imperfect and disarming, to which the Franklin Mint would never hold the patent: impossible to replicate for mass production.
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Cheers,
Jack
Proprietor
Free Range Wine & Spirits
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