Image: Homemade Collagen
Vermouth is a notoriously dry mouth. Pour a thimbleful of vermouth into a bottle of gin and eat sand in the wilderness of Sin. Drop an olive in that desert and get petrified wood, which is a tree so terrified it bursts into flames and starts barking commands like, “Remember you said you wouldn’t drink today” and “You prolly wanna call a cab.”
The mouth of the Colorado River is sometimes dry as vermouth. Then it attracts sand cats, which you’d think were fish, but you’d be drunk. Charlie Poole thought that if the river was whiskey then Jesus walked in Spirit, while Judas preferred the banks. T. Coraghessan Boyle fished stories from that river, but to boil tea from hard liquor is the gainsaying of Core.
To lick leaves from Breece D'J Pancake is catty with a sunburnt tongue, and pancakes too are notoriously dry. Nobody could choke down a single crumb but for the trembling trees of Vermont. Sizzurp inebriates differently from vermouth and is more viscous, which is to say angry, when sapped hands pound sugar spikes through maple flesh crucifying brunch.
The main thing is this: metaphysically chapped lips spit up what Stanton David Kirkham called “world-thought,” resulting in the intellectual wasteland strewn around us. Supernal moisturizer is better than crypto. In Gilead drips the One True Balm. And don’t let snakebirds nest in your head, for their wings fan flames of folly. If they muddle these grains in a green tea, what shall be flamed in the dry mouth?