California is more than just a Pacific left coast state of mind. In fact, it’s also a State of Wine! When I first moved there, nothing prepared me for the Wine Lesson 101 I would learn in the Golden State. Vino-philes in most regions drink their wines, savor the flavor, and then without a care, simply dispose of the bottles, tossing them away like last years Birkenstocks. In California it’s a little different, as re-cycling is carried to religious extremes and yes, it is the eco-friendly thing to do. You can also use that old empty wine bottle that Kerouac would be proud of, to relive those madcap grassy bowl dazed days of the Sixties.
Two things will always stand out when your memory tries to pass through the looking glass of your youth…wine and lava lamps. Hours of blissful contemplation were spent as you sat around drinking a bottle of wine with friends, or using it in your water pipe in place of H2O, and watching the lava lamp perform a dancing lightshow as you went through the night in joyful hallucination. Well, now that we are grown-ups, and drinking a better class of wine, and not that cheap bum wine spare change stuff we could barely afford, we sometimes long for the good old days. So here’s a tip for you. You can relive the good old days, and you can do it by constructing your very own lava lamp out of used wine bottles.
You can do it from any wine bottle, any size, any shape. It’s a great way to bring back a taste of nostalgia and to have your favorite brand of wine forever immortalized in your home, serving double duty, first as a palate pleasing drink, then, when empty, turning it into a memento and lasting tribute to your youth. The lava flow of the lava lamp flowed through the inner mind with heat and colors performing their ballet of bubbles. Now you can not only create a lava lamp from wine bottles, but also do your green leafy green part by recycling it this way. Here is an excellent web source for construction, http://www.psychicgoldfish.com/sub_page/whatido/lavalamp.htm.
The empty wine bottle can also be used as a basic tall candleholder. Insert the candle stem into open mouth of the bottle, and voilà, a vino candelabra. The best one to use is one of those old Italian Chianti bottles with a basket weave cover to give it that “old world” look and ambience that again was so popular in crash pad after crash pad back in the day. The wine bottle is not the only eco-friendly product that can be transformed. Take your basic cork….toss it away? I think not. It’s an Eco-Cork, and yes, there really is such a thing as a cork tree. Known as the Cork Oak tree, the bark is used for the production of corks. When properly harvested, taking the bark does not kill the tree as it regenerates in several years, which makes cork a renewable sustainable resource. The bark is harvested without machinery, and in Portugal which is where over half the world’s cork oak trees are, the cork oak tree is prohibited from being cut down.
Many children learn how to fish with the simple old set up of a line and bobber. There isn’t really an easier way to teach a youngster how to know when the fish are biting than telling him to just watch that bobber, and if it goes under, pull hard. Although bobbers aren’t terribly expensive, if you’re a wine drinker, you have the opportunity to easily make some cork bobbers of your own. Whether it’s for your children or you’re just acting like the big kid that you still are, fishing with bobbers can be loads of fun and cork bobbers are the eco friendly way to go.
One important fact to keep in mind. Before you can make a wine bottle lava lamp, you have to empty it first. This is best down with a group of close friends, music to set the strobe light mood, and a little Sixties imagination. Cheers!
By Mike Marino. Marino is the author of The Sandoz Collection FREE E-Series – Sex, drugs and rock and roll! To order your FREE E-copy email Mike at theroadhead@yahoo.com (Also includes Mikes two other e-books (The Atomic Hula) & (The Peyote Coyote) The Collection is Free to all Emerald Readers…it’s free so order today.
Photo courtesy of Stock.Xchng
Leave a Reply