The Syndicate 58/6 Premium Blended Scotch Whisky

Casefile: Syndicate 58/6

A report from inside the Organization.

I’ve been working my way inside Syndicate 58/6 for a while now. It takes time for things to develop, often at least 12 years. I want to be fully inside, almost as if I were pickled in a cask and stored in a warehouse. At any rate, as per your orders, I’ve followed my nose and scented about, so to speak, to see what I might uncover. At times I feel like I’m watching a time-lapse movie on a continuous loop  of a Burgundy Shadow Dahlia opening and closing, opening and closing. It’s almost like I’m on a roller coaster, swooping through Andalusian lemon groves, poetry slams, and cafés serving exclusively Cointreau. I find to fit in, I also have my shirts taken to a particular dry cleaner who stiffens collars with aged sherry and espresso. I’d object, but when I join the Syndicate in downing rose-studded briskets and caramel-streaked bread pudding cooked up by the Ghost of Cuisines Past (a code name?), I find I don’t mind working currying the Arabian stallions’ coats post-workout. I try to maintain my sanity at the intersection of the floral and the savory, and at times, I forget which side I work for.

When I, as a poet might write, “drink deeply” of the Syndicate 58/6, I forget my mission: My tongue sings hosannas as my mind runs through windy waving barley sheaves. My tastebuds ululate, my uvula bestirs itself and if it could give voice to it’s chthonic tremors, it’d be saying, What marvels are being wrought here? Have we gotten this terribly terribly wrong? For this is surpassingly balanced, yet rock-solid, like a trio of granite boulders carved by wind and the elements, improbably standing on each other. I resolve to get deeper, to finish my mission.

Getting down to business, a dissimulation of birds scampers regally about, each one nuanced, refined, and tokening a whole future’s worth of more to come. I truly know not what I came here for any longer—I write these words out of obligation, a message left in a bottle from a grateful castaway who won’t leave paradise regardless of the boat or plane that comes planning a rescue. This Syndicate is one that I’ve joined—that you also may join. It takes only a blood-brothership mystical rite in which The Syndicate becomes One with Us, almost as if we were drinking it. My report is done.

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