Buying Old Crow bourbon in Louisville & achieving satori

I stopped in Louisville on my way from Nashville to Racine & I was blessed with the discovery of some genuine weirdness downtown. First I tried the Thomas Edison House on a decrepit block of Shelby Avenue, but it was closed. Then I visited the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory, where I got an official rules of baseball book for $5 & some postcards at the gift shop. I even popped into the Frazer Historical Arms museum, where they sell deadly-looking but non battle-ready swords (to adults only, the gift-store clerk assured me). That stretch of Main Street, lined by restored brick, granite & marble facades circa 1900, is architecturally impressive.

But the sidewalks near the banks of the mighty Ohio River were windy, cold & nearly deserted. After eating a pint of ice cream, I bought a cheap green French-made khaki shoulder bag & some Army-issue wool-cotton-nylon socks at a shabby military surplus store run by a funny old veteran kept company by a yappy Yorkshire terrier. I skipped the Muhammed Ali museum because they charge $9 admission. No place celebrating the life & legacy of the Louisville Lip is worth that much to me.

Anyway, I wanted to buy a bottle of Old Crow Kentucky bourbon whiskey in honor of Louisville native & Old Crow addict Hunter S. Thompson. I popped into a liquor store but they didn't carry that brand, so I found a CVS drugstore above the Hard Rock cafe that did - at just $8 + tax for a fifth. On the way back to my car, parked on the corner of Fourth & Muhammed Ali Blvd. [now named Thomas Merton Square] downtown, I noticed a big metal historical marker that read as follows:

"Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, poet, social critic & spiritual writer (1915-1968), author of the autobiography 'The Seven-Storey Mountain' (1948). Merton had a sudden insight at this corner on March 18, 1958 [i.e. , that led him to refine his monastic identity with greater involvement in social justice issues. He was 'suddenly overwhelmed witht the realization that I loved all these people . . . walking and shining like the sun.'"

Ah, but it's easier to love humanity on a sunny afternoon in March, like the one I enjoyed yesterday in Louisville. And people get on your nerves a little less when you're a monk cut off from most human contact, I reckon. That's about as close to a satori moment as I've had in a while. Maybe the Old Crow will help enlighten me further when I open the bottle.