well of the blues

I live in a rural community and my son returned home from our nearby metropolis and told me he read a sign on the front of the local music emporium that the Scissor Sisters were coming there to perform. I’m figuring I won’t be making the trek to see them.

I’m afraid I upset a number of you a few weeks ago when I made a negative comment about the Scissor Sisters after seeing them on Saturday Night Live. I compared them unfavorably to Robert Johnson, one of the greatest blues players who ever lived, to which many of you are saying, “Who?”

The bottle was in the news yesterday and I thought of an old song by Jerry Jeff Walker. The song was Well of the Blues and it was about drinking. I remember the lines:

Borin’ a hole down deep in the soul
That only the bottle could fill.

I know you are thinking right now, “Who? Jimbo you are indeed a relic of some ancient time.”

My answer would be, he was the guy who wrote Mr. Bojangles. But you probably haven’t heard of that one, either.

The story I read said that when schools served milk to students in plastic bottles, replacing the old cardboard cartons, the amount of milk sold went up 8 to 18%. I remember when I was in school, I kind of enjoyed drinking milk out of those cardboard cartons. I know at this moment you’re probably saying, “Yes, but back then it was probably a drink in celebration of not being eaten by a dinosaur on the way to school.”

Touche. But, please, let me stay on subject.

We are a society that drinks out of bottles, whether it is cola, beer or the bottle of “natural spring water” Jimbo seems to have by his side all day long. The interesting thing about the story I read says that it is cheaper to put the milk in bottles than cartons, but that the bottlers are leaving the price the same and taking the difference to profit margin. This means that the bottlers of milk are selling more, making better profit margins and their customers are getting the same amount of product at the same price and enjoying it more. That would seem to be a win-win situation and it’s the way our economic system is supposed to work.

You might be thinking it’s a bad thing for the milk bottlers to be making excess profits at the expense of school kids but the fact is that in a capitalistic society supply and demand determines the price of goods sold. If the milk bottlers are making a reasonable profit, then the marketplace will allow them to do it; if not, then someone else will come along and sell the product at a lower price and less of a profit margin, but a margin that will allow them to make money. Then, of course, someone else will come along and send the milk to Bangladesh for bottling and eat everyone else’s lunch, so to speak.

But, until that day, belly up to the bar, or the school lunch line, and raise a cold one to fill that hole in the soul that only the bottle can fill.