24th
Sixteen Men On A Dead Man’s Chest
I just moved my bar from a lovely display position in the dining room to a cabinet high above the microwave. I had two reasons.
Firstly, my two oldest boys are 11 and 12, going on 16 and 13, respectively. Because of their family history, they should probably never drink. Julie and I have debated and read about the most constructive behavior to model for them, vis a vis alcohol, and basically believe that responsible, sparing-to-moderate alcohol consumption probably gives them the healthiest example of what alcohol consumption looks like. (At their mom’s, they have no exposure to alcohol consumption. This is a good thing, but I understand variety is a better thing in matters such as these.) But recently, my 11 and 12 have been talking more and more about drinking. They make remarks about rum and beer and wine, they ask what it feels like to be drunk and why people get drunk and if alcoholism really means “allergic to alcohol”. I’m pretty comfortable fielding this stuff, but their growing interest in matters of inebriation suggest that a visible bar is becoming more of a risk to them than it once was.
Second, there’s the matter of my own health and wellbeing. A little more than two years ago, Adam introduced me to my first Old Fashioned at some Back Bay Sheraton bar in Boston. It was sickly sweet and mostly gross but it was new to me and I remember asking him what was in an Old Fashioned, and he answered after a pretty short pause, “You know… I don’t know.” And I was all “whaaaaaa?” and two days later I was texting Albert from my parents’ place in Maine - bottle of Maker’s in hand - to see if he could tell me how to make a decent Old Fashioned. We didn’t have Google back then, because this was in 2009, but Albert, he knew some stuff, and the next thing I knew, I was muddling sugar cubes and orange peels in Angostura bitters and doing my damndest to dissolve sugar in alcohol, which, by the way, doesn’t work. And there began what one would rightfully call an obsession. Like the obsession I had with cycling, growing cilantro, writing HTML, and then woodworking for historic preservation, and then Javascript, then Flash, then PHP, and then whatever I could learn about Autism Spectrum Disorders, and then how Favrd’s algorithm might or might not work, and then the meta-structures of story, and then so many other things that you wonder and legitimately so how it could be worth my time to spend this much time with my nose buried in books. But this obsession, the one I can attribute to either Adam or Albert, depending on what type of sentimentality I’m feeling at that moment, was with cocktailery, and SHUT UP there’s no reason for it not to be a word. And this obsession, this cocktailery obsession (see how good it looks, all typed out like that?) has been a deep rabbit hole. For one, it’s culinary. It’s sensory, and its results and practice are intoxicating. And I don’t do anything half-ass. Except blog posts and stuff like that. This post is not about that incongruity. The point is that, before too long, I found myself making cinchona bark tinctures in pursuit of the perfect Vesper Martini - and 20 other tinctures besides. Once you’re soaking bark in grain alcohol, it’s a foregone conclusion that you’re going to be making your own bitters. And why not? And so my cabinet is stocked with homemade aromatic bitters, peruvian bitters, orange bitters, cinnamon bitters, and a couple of bottles I’m reluctant (or unable) to name.
Because it’s not just about the spirits or the liqueurs or the aperitifs and so on. It’s about the endless drink hacks you can perform if you sink enough of your life’s free time into learning how. And enough of your life’s liver. And enough of your life’s suspended judgment. And and and and and that’s the second reason the bar got put away tonight. Because I’ve seen addiction develop right under my nose, in the past, and I know how insidiously it comes. I don’t kid myself, not for a minute, into thinking that I might have fortuitously received an exemption from the universe in matters of addictive tendencies. Twitter nonsense or opium - I’m susceptible either way. Most of us are, I think. That’s what honesty tells me.
So, tonight sees the end of an era. I’ll still make fancy cocktails for friends when they come over, and I’ll drink right alongside them. But it’s going to be a little extra work to get to the ingredients, and I’m going to have a little less knowledge of which bottle is almost empty, which I’m on the verge of giving to Good Will, and which my kids might be eyeing for passage rites to come. I might not be able to mix a perfect Abbey Cocktail every time. My sidecars may swerve. But this adventure, this rite of passage if you don’t mind me calling it that, is best embarked upon straight, enough chasers, welcoming water back and other clichés to boot.
