Sad To The Bone

I thought about George Thorogood having to drink all by himself and I started crying. Hardcore crying, like where all the parts of your face just suddenly try to meet all at once where your nose is. Some people use the word crumple for this, I think. I’m talking about the sort of crying that can get you asked to leave a restaurant. I pictured his blubbery lips in a trembling frown shape as he sat in some corner of a dark, newly-constructed and unfurnished house somewhere, crossing his arms in front of his chest and sorrowfully hugging his 760ml bottle of Jim Beam Extra Black. Just George on a bare, spare chair with a blank, hopeless look in his eyes. Clutching the only friend he has in this entire world. I imagined him feeling his white blues with his prominent jaw, his headband and his sleeveless t-shirt (he had pants as well) sitting on a porch somewhere in Magnolia, Delaware, staring out across a limitless field of Black-eyed Susans towards a meaningless and friendless sunset and taking a swig of his twelve-ounce, five-percent-alcohol-by-volume good Buddy Weiser, and the tears just came. They flowed. My shoulders convulsed, and my mouth made big, ugly weeping sounds when I thought about how alone George Thorogood really was. I heard sad piano music—even though it was a vision of George Thorogood—and I saw a motion picture dream where he was walking on the side of a highway, and no one was picking him up, and all he had in the whole world was a little bit of bourbon in his sack. Actually there was some sad harmonica sounds in there, too. I visualized him in a fetal position in a padded cell somewhere with only a fifth of some Royal Brackla Scotch (single malt, aged 21 years) there to see him as a human being with feelings and I just fell apart. I just let myself feel the feelings. What did it matter that these thoughts came to me in the middle of a Walmart. It didn’t matter at all that these thoughts came to me in the middle of a Walmart.