To friendship, which is the very best kind of ship, unless you’re actually trying to get somewhere via sea or space, in which case, it’s actually helpful to have a large, self-contained vessel with appropriate technologies for making sure you can continue to breathe oxygen rather than water or vacuum, so unless the people you like are made out of that sort of thing, choose your ships wisely.
May your Heroes be as doomed as the rest of us.
May the Road rise up to meet you; and may you burrow under it and end up in your enemy’s treasury.
Here’s to those we’ve loved and lost;
thank the Powers they’re gone,
and damn the cost!
Live long, prosper, and steal the Moon.
Let’s hope our hearts are as full of Love as these glasses are full of poison.
May you arrive in Hell about three days after you’ve actually died, which will give the Devil a chance to freshen the guest suite, lay in a stock of good Scotch, and to alert all of your friends, including that one poor sod who ended up in Heaven by accident.
And now, together, we shall drink to a day where no-one in this great nation shall ever call us ‘The Space Cowboy’ again.
May you learn to understand the secret language of terns just in time to uncover their diabolical plot against all of Humanity, but not in time to stop it.
Let’s all drink to whomever installed these handy trapdoors underneath our floors, permitting us to immediately remove anyone who says ‘whomever’ when they ought to say ‘whoever’.
Here’s to givin’ the Devil his due;
for he’ll sure take from me
what he can’t get from you.
No matter what happens, we will always be together, stuck silently screaming in this infinite snapshot wherein time no longer moves and we are like pictures in a painting, our joyous toasts becoming voiceless cries for help as the seconds tick into years which, themselves, surrender into eternity.
…and we hereby promise that we shall love each other forever, or until we run out of booze, whichever comes first, and by the way, is this the last bottle?
May the hinges of Love slide us smoothly through the gates of Happiness and straight down into the depths of the Spirit, at which point, we will enter the alimentary tract, and the rest of the metaphor basically collapses.
Here’s a toast to all those dear friends who have absented themselves from our lives, thereby leaving way more Scotch for us.
