spray-paint

5,5 m x 8 m, Luxemburg

"If you freeze a lot, you drink a lot, and you gradually get amazing practice at it. I met people who could drink so much that I got intoxicated just watching them. Which is not to say that I was always just watching. The most tolerable of all was a general with a gray beard and a copper face. In the war with the Turks he had lost the top of his skull in a saber fight and therefore always kept his hat on, even when we were dining. During the meal he drank at least 3 bottles of vodka and a bottle of arrack in the back. But it also happened that he drank two bottles of arrack. But no matter how much he drank, he never got drunk.

I was puzzled until I found out the strange secret. The general used to lift his hat a little every hour or so. And one evening I noticed that he not only lifted his hat, but also a silver plate attached to it, which served as a skullcap. In this unusual way the accumulated alcoholic haze rose like a cloud from his head, and he was sober again as when he began to eat. 

My friends would not believe me. Once, when he had just put his hat back on, I stepped behind him and held a fidibus, which I had lit on my Dutch pipe, in the middle of the rising cloud of alcohol. This gave a splendid spectacle! For the cloud ignited and hovered in bluish fire like a halo over the old man's hat."

Preceding drawing and mural: Felix Gephart