it is the future. right now is the future. how else can it be stated? you find yourself one day embodying some romantic notion you’d long given up on or reluctantly outgrown. robe on. a barefoot walk over the prized new york parquet into the bulb-lit kitchen. having pissed you go for another bottle. you stand there, maybe forgetting what you came in for, maybe distracted by some kitchen apparatus you never touch and can’t fathom. behind the sink, mixed in with the mysterious “virgin” olive oils is a bottle of eleven year old single malt scotch. it’s the wee hours. it’s the future,

the one you just knew would come five years prior. the one you quietly romanced in your mind. you could see it then, soft lit maybe but clear enough. there you were, barefoot, bearded, holding a cocked bottle of scotch to your mouth five feet above some filthy kitchen floor somewhere. this moment seemed inevitable then, and it seemed like poetry. nothing could have been more appealing in those wee hours passed. but here you are. and? well? is it poetry?

all the cliches about wisdom offer little insight when it comes to reality of course. you’re well read for an ignoramus, but all the poems of the great poets, all the resonant philosophies of the big minds, all the earnest words from your own father’s mouth illuminate little more than their own wise faces. when your young you see those bare feet clearly, but they are bathed in the blood of a million conquests, they are gnarled from naked treks over frozen mountains. you see the pilling robe, the grime, maybe a limp and a handful of scars, but they are bolstered by the glories of a great man’s life. everything is a trophy in these visions. the gnarled feet hard earned. the scotch much deserved. you see the the worn face and the ashen hands grasping the thick bottle, but you infer a toppling clutch of massive paintings, a pile of yellowing manuscripts. you naively impose impossible peaks and valleys into that vision. but when you find yourself there in that bulb lit kitchen, barefoot, robed, drinking scotch from the bottle, you can maybe understand for the first time what was tragic about those poems, why the philosophers were pulling their hair out, what your father’s words were cautioning you about. reality. the bare, bulb-lit kitchen reality all that youthful romanticism so thoroughly shrouds.

when you actually find yourself in that kitchen you realize maybe that the scotch is still well deserved, only it’s not earned through faithful service in ideological revolutions, nor through the fevered heat of a genius’ toil. you realize that the scotch is earned by not cracking and curling up into a ball under your desk. it’s earned by paying taxes, by going to the weddings your invited to, by riding the subway, by standing in line. it’s earned by not murdering any of the myriad of filthy swine you come across each day. you earn that scotch by just getting through the days, plain and simple.

so here you are young-blood. you made it. welcome to the future. enjoy.