“Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin”
Love is in the air, or so says my shirt. I usually don’t like shirts with tired clichés written on them, but the way the letters both blend in with and work with the background comforts me. And the soft red leaves abstractly reminiscent of hearts flying off the otherwise barren and faded trees and the patches of fuschia and lime spraypainted on the heather-wheat sky and background do something for me. Draw my eyes in longer than initially expected and then my mind.
Love is in the air and a bottle of gin is in my hand. Though, because I don’t really drink, I suppose for me it’s purely decorative. That is, the idea of it is decorative, because I was kidding and don’t really have a bottle of gin in my hand.
Words can be very decorative, and so can ideas. They decorate my mind like clouds decorate the sky, or leaves flying through the air, or an overwhelming falling grid of water droplets, or pinpoints of light shining through some distant black sheet pricked by the hand of god in several thousand places visible to the naked eye, or the cold round perfect lamp of the moon– hard to the imagined touch but so soft to our eyes– all decorations hanging in the sky. The moon is one of my favorite decorations.
Through all of this, I think to myself, decorations don’t have to be meaningless or purposeless or lacking deep intrinsic beauty. The word decoration connotatively trivializes anything under its denotative dome, but something like an expression of the soul can make a fine and lovely decoration. People pay a lot of money for such decorations, even people unable to feel or understand the meaning behind them, their real beauty.
I don’t always like the decor of the inside of my mind, but for that very reason, I try to add as many big and little representational objects and details that I find comforting, when I’m able. I also try to make something lovelier to me out of the pieces that scare or bother me. An endless process, as things that scare or bother me enter my mind everyday. Some things, of course, just go into the closet or a dark hidden pantry or a storage room to be hidden from my own regular viewing, but once in a while, I open the door and stare at them, stare inside them, sometimes walk away horrified and sometimes linger, holding and stroking them.
Some internal things that bother us cannot be changed; no amount of paint or wrap or structural manipulation sticks to them at all, or even if it did, could ever change the way they look or feel to us. All we can do is hold them and nurture them from time to time, and try not to let the feelings they evoke control our lives.
On the theme of love and gin, I love the lyrics of this song. It’s called, surprise, surprise, "Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin". It describes, quite creatively and directly, how love is like a bottle of gin. Here, give it a listen:
For further page decoration, here are the song lyrics that explain how love is like a bottle of gin:
"It makes you blind, it does you in/ It makes you think you’re pretty tough/ It makes you prone to crime and sin/ It makes you say things off the cuff/ It’s very small and made of glass/ and grossly over-advertised/ It turns a genius to an ass/ and makes a fool think he is wise/ It could make you regret your birth/ or turn cartwheels in your best suit/ It costs a lot more than it’s worth/ and yet there is no substitute/ They keep it on a higher shelf/ the older and more pure it grows/ It has no color in itself/ but it can make you see rainbows/ You can find it on the Bowery/ Or you can find it at Elaine’s/ It makes your words more flowery/ It makes the sun shine, makes it rain/ You just get out what they put in/ and they never put in enough/ Love is like a bottle of gin/ But a bottle of gin is not like love"