There’s nothing nicer than a glass of ice-cold absinthe on a hot day.
I wrote this story about Pamela Wilson’s paintings of absinthe drinkers in celebration of both the decadent Bohemia she imagines and the drink itself. I love absinthe, I love feeling that coldness spread across my chest, and I love the dreamy buzz it causes.
Pamela’s paintings capture a wonderfully theatrical and bizarre world – a world that I wish existed in reality, and would cheerfully participate in. However, it’s also a world that could quickly tip into becoming a nightmare.
Writing the story gave me an opportunity to think about the nature of real Bohemia – with its attractively idealistic individualistic anarchism, and its sordid and evil consequences flourishing alongside it. The desire for utopia is always stained by the fact that entropy eats away at the ideal as much as it gnaws at the material.
