Snake oil

Saturday, August 31, 2013

I was in a Hoboken bar last night waiting for a rock band and thinking: is it possible to be doing two different things at the same time, things that seem contrary to each other, and still have both thing valid.

Such as someone selling himself on a snake oil cure for his addition to booze – and telling everybody that he’s on the wagon – when at night he roams bars like this, deep in the dark life?

Can he actually make me believe that he’s found the magical elixir that will turn his life around, cure all of his ills, while at the same time still swimming in the same swill that made him ill in the first place?

Not a chance.

One or the other is valid, and he can’t be curing himself with his magic potions while still engaged in the same habits that made him sick.

So he’s trying to sell more than snake oil, he’s trying to pan himself off as reformed when he’s not, and the worst part, is that he got the idea of getting the cure because someone he is supposedly close to really is ill, and is taking the hard rode to recovery, and really trying to turn his life around, when all the first guy wants is for people to think he’s reformed so he can keep on scamming people the way he did when he started.

After the first drink, all this faded into the bliss of watching the New York Yankees win – for a change.

But then, like the guy who is really sick, they’re taking the real road to recovery, not faking it.