Please, Sir...

There were times when Whistle Pig fancied himself a saint of sorts, aching with grief at the human condition. What compassion! What empathy! To feel this degree of pain only upon witnessing the everyday tragedy of the faultlessly pathetic!

Of course, saint he most certainly was not. His reaction to human suffering—hardly selfless and hardly proactive— was guilt, darling readers, about his own privilege.

I imagine Whistle Pig is not the only one to suffer this burden. To realize the luxury and excess of your own life in the face of someone else’s nothingness can be a wearying experience. There was something so unpleasant about it, so uncomfortable, thought Whistle Pig, and he squirmed to be eating his croissant at the bus stop under the hateful eye of the have-nots.

Now a conundrum presents itself. Without the bottom, there is no one at the top; and so it seemed to Piggy-dearest that his happiness was at once made possible and threatened by those he pitied. Well now he was in a pickle.

Thank heavens for a good rye. What better way to rectify this taboo but ever-so real upstairs/downstairs dilemma than by way of a drink?

The next time the Pig felt the oncoming awareness of misfortune, he uncorked his flask and poured two glasses: one for himself, one for the bum on the corner.

You can’t pity a guy who’s drinking good whiskey. 

Rye on Canvas

Whistle Pig did not generally indulge in self-doubt. Oh yes, it is an indulgence: a pleasant wavering submission to the fact that you are not good enough, which is of course easier than manning up and refusing to pussy-foot around life’s challenges. Whistle Pig, if you will look past the irony of the phrase, preferred to man up.

But he had always allowed his confidence some leeway when it came to art. For all his trying, the Pig’s artistic endeavors had never proved aesthetically appealing. And so he had a room full of canvases stored away somewhere, maybe to serve some future utilitarian purpose along the lines of tinder.

But shame on you, Piggy dearest! Realism is for the general population, the people who need to look at a painting and see a human being staring back, a recognizable, average, everyday human being in all its boring entirety. Reach beyond that superficial understanding of painting as a visual genre. When has art ever really been about what the painter sees? Allow me a brief foray into hippie-dom: feeling, my darlings, is at the root of all the great masterpieces.

And so it was, in a moment of clarity, induced—obviously—by his drink of choice, that Whistle Pig made a final attempt at art. How the brush did dance! Skipping across canvas with unrivaled fervor, he poured out the story of our modern age. It spoke of pain. It spoke of angst. It spoke of heartache and unrequited love. And it spoke of happiness and love fulfilled and passion and really good whiskey. It was, in short, an opus for the ages.

It now hangs behind a bar somewhere. No museums or galleries for this one: none of the destinations of those pretentious elite who feign understanding of almost everything. A painting of such magnanimity deserves to be viewed by those who really truly can enjoy the finer things in life.

Rye drinkers, my sweethearts, raise a glass to art. You are the true connoisseurs.