Gunner Kearney walked each morning to Kate Kearney’s Cottage and drank a single shot of Paddy’s Old Irish Whiskey before computer programming under the fluorescent lights of a large multi-national. The walk to Kate’s was metaphorical, only in his mind, a pre-work ritual to briefly color his world ethnic. The morning coffee would suffice for entertainment, the liquid of the damned. Caffeine was invented was to make dull jobs tolerable.
He walked in a world filled with vague resentments and veiled anxieties. His friend Arness dreamed dreams of lofty vision. He had elaborate plans of marketing “essence of scorpion”, a distillation of dried scorpion cartilage that could be applied as a powder or spray. The scent would be ‘musky yet smooth, with a pinch’.
One Tuesday for lunch, Arness and Gunner left the large multi-national and got in Gunner’s Taurus and traveled wordlessly for miles, reaching Kentucky by two and Georgia by five. They drove till the soil bled clay-red, replacing the exhaust-riddled February snow. They entered a two-bit bar on a one-lane road, a saloon picked at random, and stayed when they learned the barkeep had Paddy’s Old Irish Whiskey.
After the third shot of Paddy the joint began to look like Heemskerck painting. The bottles lined up behind the bar like a collection of future promises.
“How can a fella get in trouble around here?” Arness asked.
“Now why would you want to get in trouble? You look like Yankee accountants to me.” said the owner, a puffy-faced man with craggy hands.
“Not accountants but close. We were at work this morning in Michigan and now we’re here. We’ve discovered the elbow of the desperation curve. Arness, you 'splain.”
“Yeah, we used to talk about the elbow of the curve financially, that point at which we had amassed a nest egg that would basically double on its own in a few years and make our retirement a fait accompli. Instead we discovered that there is a point on the graph where desperation tends to scale off the charts, basically at that point where youthful enthusiasm ends and only ten thousand, three-hundred twenty-six working days stand between you and retirement.”