the Phlog

It is 4 minutes to midnight and dinner was too long ago, and Tom Waits is singing Tom Traubert’s Blues and I follow its lyrics under a table lamp as it drags along the bottom of my cold floor, in a voice “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.” I should be drinking bourbon but I hate whisky, unless it is poured down my throat mixed with Coke. So gin is better. I started that after I had hiked seven hours up to Birkat Sharaf and slept under a juniper. It was only later that I had recognised the berries that I had twirled between my dry, excited fingertips that night on the bottles of Gordon’s. It made a good story, which I repeated often to myself. I should have taken my hip flask to Wadi Geel and sipped on it on top of my hillock. Instead, I used the car as foreground.