Second Clementine

We spend a lot of time in our lives trying to tame paper tigers, fighting windmills and chasing dragons.

We're pretty stupid that way, I guess.

They say that part of the biggest clusterfuck about drugs is that, the first time you try a lot of the hard shit, the high is so unfuckingbelievable that the track-marked motherdrugger spends the remainder of his or her natural life using to try to replicate the intensity of that first line, or that first hit. And that's the problem: it's never going to be that good again.

Ever have a car that was as awesomsauce as your first car? No. Neither have I. And, for two years, I drove around in Herbie, the Love Bug.


Um, yeah. Seriously, that's a picture of my car. And even that wasn't as cool (at least, in my head) as my first car. Which is just another example of there being serious issues with my brain.

Anyway, we're dreamers. We're thrill-seekers, and we're obsessed with replicating those first thrills of our lives. Remember your first kiss? Um, I do. Frequently. Sometimes my trousers are around my ankles when I'm remembering it. Sometimes not. You know-- depends.

Though I never really thought of myself as someone who chased dragons-- because I've never done drugs or consumed alcohol other than Shabbat wine or a sip of champagne-- I've recently realized that I do chase my own particular dragons, in my own particular way. Maybe this is why I've owned 10 cars in the space of approximately sixteen years. Here we go, in chronological order:

1966 Volkswagen Beetle
1990 Ford Crown Victoria, late of the Delaware State Police
1988 Volvo 240-DL
1994 Ford Taurus
1997 Ford Crown Victoria
2001 Chevrolet Impala
2001 Volkswagen New Beetle Turbo (Herbie replica pictured above)
2005 Ford Focus
2001 Chrysler PT Cruiser
2002 Volvo S-40 Turbo

Yeah, I'm a little embarrassed by that, but I also think it's fucking awesome. And, I can promise you that there will be a lot, lot more, and some of them will be pretty fucking crazy.

Trust me.

Fortunately, I'm not this way with women. My wife has often opined how lucky she is, and how lucky I am, that I am not as fickle.

But I don't think it's about being fickle, automotively speaking. I think it's about thrill-seeking. About dragon chasing. I'm always trying to replicate the excitement of getting into a "new" car for the first time. Because, really, there is no feeling in the world like it. And it doesn't have anything to do with "New Car Smell," because I've only owned a "brand new car" two times out of the ten.

I also chase the clementine dragon. If you eat clementines, you know what I'm talking about. You can't eat just one of those pert little orange bastards. They're just so fucking good. You eat one and you go, "Oh! Oh, that was so sweet and succulent and wet and refreshing, and..... small. How the hell can I not have another one?" And you have a second one.

And the second one tastes like shit.

This happened to me on Sunday. And, because I learn from my mistakes like a lobotomized housecat, it happened to me again last night. I brought a second clementine upstairs as I was thinking about a blog topic. I bit into it lustily, my oral cavity wet with the sensory memory of the first, glorious clementine I consumed about three minutes prior.

"Auuughghh!" I whined. "Fucking dis-gus-ting! Why is it that every time I go to have a second clementine, it inevitably tastes like a monkey's dick?" I asked, rhetorically and hypothetically, of course. I was about to put another piece of it in my mouth when Mrs. Apron, at her sewing machine, exclaimed,

"Don't eat more of it! Throw it in the disposal."

"But that's all the way downstairs!" I bitched.

"Then throw it in the trashcan here."

"But it'll rot in here!" I moaned. Jesus, can you imagine being married to me for even ten minutes?

I ended up going (all the way) downstairs and throwing it angrily into the disposal. The aftertaste is still befouling my mouth, even as I type. What I need, of course, are cookies.

The question is: how can I eat just seven?

If I Drank...

Most of you know, I think, that I am a teetotaler. It's not especially something that I wear upon my sleeve (well, except when I'm writing about it, or indignantly refusing an offer of alcohol by saying, with nose gallantly upturned, "Well, I don't drink!") but, at 30 years old, it does come up quite a bit. Like, at rehearsal last week, when one of the choristers was turning 21 and excitedly approached me to ask for my input on what ought to be her "first legal drink?"

"Um..." I hemmed, searching through the dusty card catalog in my brain that contained references to alcoholic drinks I have heard in movies, television shows, and in eavesdropped conversations with others who libate, "a Cosmopolitan?"

A woman with whom I worked ten years ago used to drink Cosmopolitans, and she introduced mention of this drink into almost every conversation we had, so it's understandable that it's the first "drink concoction" that would leap into my brain. This woman also told me, with great enthusiasm, that she enjoyed pleasuring herself to the sounds of Frank Sinatra's "My Way" whilst utilizing a battery powered device she referred to as "The Bullfrog."

I sometimes think about what I'd be like if I drank. I'd certainly be less, well, unique, and I suspect that's not an altogether small part of why I consistently abstain, because it's now a part of my personality, one of the bits-and-pieces that makes me me. Haha-- that looks funny-- "me me."

ME ME ME ME! LA LA LA LA! YOU YOU YOU YOU! FA SO LA TI DO!

Which brings me quite handsomely to my second thought about me knocking back a few: I suspect that my already dubious sense of humor would probably take a rather suicidal nosedive. Funny people (I'm funny, right?) who don't drink have to go through their lives being routinely accosted by drinkers who believe that we will "be so much fuckin' funnier drunk" and are often told, "Oh, man, I would LOVE to see you drunk! You'd be SO. FUNNY!" Well, I'm not so sure about that. I had always thought that humor was the result of carefully-constructed word-choices and/or unwitting sock + trouser combinations, and I don't know if I could muster the synaptic control to be funny if I were intoxicated. I would most likely be way too encumbered by feelings of guilt and obsessive fears that I could hear my liver changing shape inside me to be very witty.

Of course, nobody really knows what a non-drinker would be like as a drinker. Being a world-renowned featherweight, I suspect the first and most consistent thing I would be is passed the fuck out. That said, it is very possible that I would enjoy drinking if that is the usual result for someone my weight. I do love being seepie-bye.

What I can say with pretty cinder-block-like certainty is that, if I started drinking....

* I would pee everywhere.

Because alcohol lowers your inhibitions, your respect for law, order, civility, and public spaces, and increases your urge to urinate, I would totally whizz on your garden gnome's face.

* I would get arrested.

See above.

* I would not hit the Four Loko.

Not just because it's dangerous, expensive, trendy, and just fucking stupid, but because watermelon-flavored things never, EVER taste like actual watermelon.

* I would only drink drinks that require the obligatory donning of a smoking jacket.

Because, really, that would be, like, my goddamned alcoholic's uniform.

What's yours?

* I would go absolutely shitbroke buying all the high-quality paraphernalia.

Do you have any concept of just how much there is to BUY when you're a drinker?

And I LOVE to buy things!

If you're an insufferable fop, there's hand-engraved sterling hip flasks and delicate, cut-glass punch-bowl sets from the Victorian era, if you're an acne-ridden, knuckle-walking frat bra, there's beer towers with ice chambers and inflatable beer pong racks (yes, I looked this up: http://www.drinkinginovations.com/) and, if you're just a run-of-the-mill, semi-well-off middle-aged schmuck in the suburbs, there's a whole section of "Crate & Barrel's" website devoted to alcoholiania. Do you doubt me? Here's the subset of menu options stemming from "DRINKWARE":

Wine glasses
Champagne flutes
Beer & drinking glasses
Margarita glasses
Cordial glasses
Acrylic glasses (What, we're drinking acrylic now? Four Loko's got competition...)
Bar accessories
Pitchers and decanters ...and, finally and mysteriously,
Coffee mugs (I guess you need special ones for Irish Coffee)

* I'd drink to your health

Which, if you think about it, is pretty funny. So is, "Bottoms Up," if you're emotionally twelve years old. Or drunk.

The Party

"The Party" is the title of a 1968 movie starring Peter Sellers in the pre-political-correctness role of Indian actor Hrundi V. Bakshi, who plays the sitar, is extremely polite and clumsy and, oh yeah, wears swaths of dark brown body makeup. In the film, Hrundi is mistakenly invited to a swank Hollywood bash where feeds a parakeet "birdy num-num," a runaway elephant gets a bubble-bath, and the police are summoned.

This blog post does not refer to that party, but, rather my sister and her new husband's party, celebrating their marriage and the birth of my nephew-- both events happening at approximately the same moment.

This festive do took place on Saturday evening and, miraculously, my wife and I were able to attend, in the one moment of our lives that was not consumed by a "Pirates" rehearsal. My mother, whose neuroses are reaching new and teetering heights with the appearance of her first grandchild, hired a Registered Nurse at some ungodly hourly rate to babysit the child while we all went off to the party to enjoy ourselves.

Or, did we?

My wife and I drove my mother and my other sister to the party, which was held at a nice-ish restaurant. We had the second floor to ourselves. I pulled our car up to a sign that said "STOP: WAIT FOR VALET." No valet was there, so we waited. The man who eventually showed up knocking on the driver's side window and almost giving me apoplexy was not a valet, but a valet-in-training: my father.

"Mummy! Leave the keys in here! Go in-- have fun! I'll take care of this!"

"Where's the fucking valet?" I asked, knowing he was paying for one.

"Sveetie! Don't worry, you worry all the time. Leave the car with me," he cooed, stroking my cheek in that patronizing way of his as three other cars lined up behind mine.

"You going to take care of all these sonsofbitches, too?" I asked, pointing to a white SUV that, whoops, contained my 85-year-old step grandmother.

"Sure!" he cried.

Sure. Why not? He's the Bionic-Jew. He can park your cars, grill the hors d'oeuvres, uncork the bubbly, and clean up afterwards without breaking a sweat.

Oh, yeah, and he's also really good at yelling at everybody behind the scenes while maintaining an unflappable facade. He could have been Head Maitre d' at the Four Seasons. You know, if he wasn't Israeli.

I was very interested in consuming heavy quantities of succulent-looking hors d'oeuvres (yes, they were probably made by my father in between scrubbing the lavatories and applying fondant to the cake) but I was monopolized by a totally bizarre woman with stringy brown hair who introduced herself to me as the woman who "used to make me peanut butter sandwiches."

For a millisecond, I was scared to death that I had just met my real mother.

Fortunately, she was the mother of my first friend, who lived a few doors down from us back in the old days. She had a daughter who was my sister's age, and they played together, and I played with her son until they moved away when I was around six years old. The daughter came bounding in later, proudly displaying her gigantic new husband and her gigantic new breasts, which were careening out of her black lacy top.

"What the hell was that nutcase from our street doing with her tits on display like some Victorian prostitute?"

"She just bought them-- her mother has a new set, too," my mother told me on the phone the next day.

The silicone might have been flowing freely at this shindig, but the mixed drinks were not-- unless you paid for them, that is. This was a huge bone of contention for my brother-in-law's mother, whose family, um, likes their alcohol wet and constant-- through an IV drip, if possible. I was shocked that my parents, both teetotallers and tightwads, even sprung for free beer and wine at the bar. My father was all prepared to make an apologetic speech about the situation to everyone when my oldest sister convinced him to shut the fuck up, which is not an easy feat to accomplish.

Believe me, I've tried.

As for my side of the family, I was fortunate enough to be seated next to my alcoholic aunt, who was already H.O.A. (Hammered On Arrival) so paying for mixed drinks didn't seem to bother her very much. I have no doubt that she had a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a funnel in her purse anyway. She's the one who rather infamously prepared for my dry wedding by dressing in a sari and consuming some unknown, fetid liquid out of a hip-flask in the bathroom.

My thoroughly inebriated aunt hissed and slurred into my right ear for two-and-a-half hours straight, and the topics of conversation roamed haphazardly from her opinion of my long-deceased grandmother ("Biggest snob in the world! When she was diagnosed with lymphoma, she decided she wanted a mink. Your fucking grandfather bought her a mink AND a chinchilla!"), her taste in music, ("I've got Emilie Autumn on my iPod-- she's a punk violinist. Suicidal. A goddamn genius. She was institutionalized several times so she had a lot of time to practice violin."), and her thoughts on male sexuality, ("Your sister should be on top of that handsome young kid at the table behind us. After 18, their semen gets all fucked up.")

I don't want to seem like an exaggerator when I say that she talked to just me for two-and-a-half hours straight-- she graced others with her presence and charming perspicacity as well, forcing my family to make apologies for indelicacies other than just the cash bar debacle.

Maybe I would have had a better time with a different seating arrangement, but I don't think so. The party was celebrating a dubious marriage and a kid who was being babysat by a nurse, harkening back to the way my parents rolled back in the old days, when my mother had a nurse for the first six weeks at home after each of us was born. I suppose, in that and other respects, some things never change. My aunt is always inappropriate. My parents are always apologizing. I never get to eat as much as I want. The best boobs are always fake. And the one thing people really care about is whether or not the drinks are on the house.

Drinky Drink

Sometimes, our society really gets on my wick.

I guess it's good that I have a blog.

A thoroughly illuminating article appeared in the New York Times online edition today that centers around alcohol and work, two items that should never be combined in the first place.

According to Jody Queen-Hubert, executive director of cooperative education and career services at New York's Pace University, you shouldn't go out boozing with co-workers and/or your boss.

Wow. Who knew, right? So glad I read the NYT for actual information and not just snob appeal.

Cy Wakeman, president of a human resources consulting firm agrees, stating that "the risk is very high that something negative will come out of it." I wonder if having a beaver-bumping party with your supervisor counts as "negative" but let's assume for the moment that it does, or at least that the fallout from it does. Certainly sticking your foot in your mouth, making an inappropriate comment about minorities or the well-endowed or the emotionally disturbed may earn you demerits, even if you manage to keep your hands to yourself and/or your peenie locked up in its pleated, gabardine cell.

Let's face it, though I don't drink and never have, I'm well aware that people aren't exactly on their A-game when they've been tossing back a few, regardless of what they may think of that themselves. When you're in the company of the suits, you always want to be on your A-game, and gabbing it up while sloshed doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. That said, I'm left to ask the question: why is alcohol a part of work culture at all? Now, working in the non-profit sector, and a very small non-profit at that, I can't imagine having a three martini lunch with my executive director, though I admit the ensuing mayhem would probably be You Tube-worthy. Obviously, we're talking about the for-profit, corporate culture. I don't know what it is about alcohol that makes it pervade into even the occupational facet of our lives, where we're supposed to be competent, sober professionals. What is this seductive allure that comes with introducing alcohol into work relationships? Is there anybody who actually thinks it's a good idea?

When it comes time for the advice section of the article, Queen-Hubert gives some pretty shitty advice:

If colleagues regularly have drinks after work, order what everyone else is having but sip it slowly. “Make it last all night,” Ms. Queen-Hubert said. “Holding a drink without drinking is a way to feel like part of the crowd without compromising your judgment.”

No offense, Queenie, but what the fuck is that? Why should I have to spend $8.00 on a glass of wine because the other assholes sitting at the table are drinking? Why can't I drink a Diet Coke? Or water? What the hell does it matter what I do? Why can't they just do what they want and I do what I want?

Ah, because, amongst drinkers, abstaining is not allowed.

See Section B of said article:

Q. How do you politely decline to drink, especially if others are urging you to have one?

Well, here's my A.

"I don't drink."

Any further questions? Go fuck yourself.

I think it's pretty amazing the balls people grow when it's time to grill someone about why they don't drink. If you order a hoagie with no tomatoes, does everybody sitting at your table you at Quiznos bombard you with interrogatives about the abberation of your order?

"I just don't get it, man-- why don't you eat tomatoes?"

"Like, what's up with that?"

"Dude-- we all ordered tomatoes. What are you-- a fag?"

Somehow, though, in our culture, posing unrelenting, personal questions to the unfortunate teetotaler in the room is perfectly acceptable behavior. Why do we need a "polite way" to refuse a drink? Aren't I polite about everything else? Why is this even an issue. You do what you do, let me do what I do.

The problem, as I see it, is that people who consume alcohol, particularly large quantities thereof, want to feel their behavior being normalized. In order to accomplish that, one of two things needs to happen:

1.) They need to harrass and harangue anybody who is not participating in their behavior or.

2.) They need total compliance, participation, and assimilation from everybody in the room.

Otherwise, their behavior becomes questionable. And we cannot have that because, in our culture, engaging in the consumption of alcohol is acceptable and "normal," and abstinence is weird and suspect.

Q. When you attend business-related social events with more-senior colleagues, they always seem to be holding a drink. Could your refusal to do the same draw attention to your youth and inexperience?

Funny, I thought that refusing to do what everybody else is doing might draw attention to your independence, logical thought and self-preservation instinct. It might show that you aren't a squabbling little toadie that only wants to play dress-up in Daddy's big shoes and pretend to shave like the big boys. Of course, those participating in the New York Times article disagree with me, stating emphatically that you must "play along to get along."

"If you are at a high-profile event and all the executives are having a drink, you may feel you need one to be part of the club,” she noted. “That being said, you can still drink very little of it or have one drink and then switch to water.”

Man, fuck that. If that's what you need to do to be accepted in corporate culture, if working hard and making intelligent decisions isn't enough, fuck that. Hard.

The icing on the cake, or perhaps I should say "the ice shavings in the bourbon" comes like a thunderclap in the closing paragraph of the article in answer to the question, "How can you tell if you have a drinking problem that needs to be addressed?" The answer stunned me:

"A. If you can relax at professional events only by having a drink, that could indicate a problem... You may be using alcohol as a crutch when navigating uncomfortable social situations."

Well, yeah-- isn't that what your article just advised its readers to do-- use alcohol as a crutch? "Look, as long as you have that all-important scotch in your hand, that Holy Grail of corporate America, you'll do just fine." I mean, you're kidding me, right?

There are a lot of things about this world that I wish were different, but attitudes towards alcohol rank pretty high on my list.

See-gar

Because life in 2009 is kind of weird, many of you know that I have been ill recently.

Used to be, the only people who knew I was sick were my mother, my doctor, and the unfortunate gentleman whom I coughed and schnazzed on while waiting in line at the Post Office.

Speaking of coughing and schnazzing, I've been doing a lot of that lately. As I write this blog, actually. I hate to see our brand new flat screen monitor getting speckled with my piggie sickie sputum dots, but my boney little fingers can only cover so much of my fat fucking trap. I've been expectorating recently thick, gray/green gloopy objects that have the consistency of Polaner All-Fruit left out in the sun for six weeks.

This recent infectious episode has brought to mind an unfortunate time in my earlier days when I undertook the dubious habit of smoking cigars. Now, I don't drink alcohol, and I never have, and I don't do drugs, and I never have (though I was, up until today, on three different antibiotics, which some might argue would constitute pharmacological abuse) and I like to smugly contend that I have never bowed to peer-pressure but, really, I have.

Come on, gloat.

Back in high school, a good friend of mine and I had just been to see Saving Private Ryan, easily the least funny Tom Hanks movie since "The 'Burbs." Seeing the film filled my dear, blonde friend with an overwhelming sense of American pride. It filled me with an overwhelming desire to vomit profusely and/or never sleep again. As we sat on his parents' porch in the middle of the night, he must have noticed my anxious and diaphoretic state, keen observer that he was.

"I'll be right back."

"Where are you going?" I asked, semi-panicked that the Nazis would storm the porch and annihilate me if I were left alone.

"I'll just be a second. I'm going to bring you something that will relax you," he said, disappearing into the house.

I was uncomfortable. I knew whatever he was going to come back outside with was going to be weird. I was worried it was going to be pot. Everyone tried to get everyone to smoke pot in high school, and I was already a junior and nobody had tried to force it on me yet-- so this must be it, I thought. On the other hand, I had a latent suspicion that this friend of mine was gay... A lightning quick image flashed through my mind of him gliding back onto the porch wearing nothing but a grin and half-open silk kimono, holding a pastry bag filled with ricotta cheese.

Fortunately, he returned fully clothed holding a large zip-lock bag containing two cigars. The whole Monica Lewinsky thing hadn't happened yet, so I was no longer worried about sexual misadventures.

"These are really good," he claimed. "And nothing is more relaxing than a good cigar."

"Really?" I said with my budding skepticism. "Even more relaxing than a blowjob?"

I have no idea why I asked that. It would be years before I would know what one felt like. Besides, the goal was supposed to be decreasing sexual tension.

"Yeah, actually, they are."

Definitely gay, I decided.

"It's fine if you don't want to try, but I'm going to have one," he said, chopping off the tip like an overzealous rabbi at a briss.

I watched him in profile as he lit the thing and as his lips puffed away at it. He seemed to know what he was doing. Then again, in high school, lots of us seem to know what we're doing. Take driving, for instance. I don't think I actually knew what I was doing behind the wheel of a car until I was twenty-three. Maybe even later.

My friend settled into the porch chair, slid down an inch, and closed his eyes, the cigar resting lazily in his mouth. If he got any cozier, he would have undoubtedly caught fire.

"Awright, you sonofabitch. Cut me one," I said, craving a relaxed, semi-altered state that would get the images of young mens' limbs and necks being blown up all over Normandy Beach.

And so began and ended my first cigar. I walked home, fell into bed and slept deeply and lusciously-- for a long, long time. It was a blissful sleep, devoid of any of the nightmares, anxieties, borderline perversions or paranoid hallucinations that plagued my rest from age 7 on upwards. I slept, as they say, like the dead, only without the smell. It was, in a word, beautiful.

Then, I woke up, went to the bathroom, and rhythmically hacked up green mung globules for half a fucking hour.

I smoked maybe thirty cigars from age seventeen to age twenty-three. During that time, I was convinced on at least three different occasions that I was suffering from oral cancer. I wasn't, of course. I was biting my inner cheek in my sleep, leaving gross wounds in there. Another time, I had taken up the bagpipe chanter and developed a blister-like growth on my lower inner lip from pursing and blowing so hard. These were all diagnosed by physicians whom I visited, telling all of them I was "a smoker."

"Well, how often do you smoke?"

"Um... I don't know. I smoke a cigar maybe once every three or four months."

"That really doesn't qualify you as a smoker, sir," one of them said to me.

Great, I thought. What the hell do I have to do to get some recognition for my sins around here: put my mouth on the tailpipe of a 1970s Mercedes 300-D for a month straight?

My sophomore year of college, my girlfriend at the time brought me home to meet her thoroughly disturbed parents. The mother had purchased me, in honor of my birthday, a humidor filled with high-quality cigars and two butane Colibri lighters.

"Use them in good health," she snorted.

I stopped smoking cigars when I was twenty-two and was training to enter the police academy. Seemed like a logical time to quit-- even if I didn't really qualify as a smoker anyway.

Strange Dish, That One

I feel real weird about the snack I'm having right now:

1 potato latke, lukewarm and soft (because I was too impatient for it to get hot and crispy in the oven.)

1 pickle, kosher dill.

1 side of ranch dressing (for the latke, not the pickle.)

If I didn't know better, I would think I was either one of two things:

A bachelor

or

Pregnant.

We all know that I'm neither, but it makes you wonder, doesn't it? They say that you can learn a lot about a creature by analyzing its, um, leave-takings. I wonder what an ethnographer/pervert would learn about me by analyzing mine.

I'm also drinking out of a glass which has etched on it the ingredients for a variety of alcoholic concoctions, which definitely makes me seem more bachelor than pregnant. The drink recipes, if one can call them that, are for the following:

Whisky Sour

Manhattan

Bacardi

Daiquiri

Tom Collins

Martini

Gibson

Of course, I'm drinking out of said glass a spritzer, made from seltzer water and cranberry juice, roughly a 60/40 blend. Back to pregnant again.

This glass was left, along with a box of Arm & Hammer deodorizer, in our refrigerator by the previous owners of this house who, I have a hunch, enjoyed more than their fair share of each of the previously listed liquid delicacies. And that's fine for them. I have to admit that I do get a certain amount of enjoyment and smug satisfaction out of drinking a non-alcoholic beverage from this particular glass. It's "ironic" the way other things that aren't pretend that they are: like mall security guards who are dressed like police officers or straight girls who frequent gay bars.

I don't drink alcohol.

There. I said it.

(You still like me, right?)

I used to dread telling people this, because there's nothing, short of admitting that you dislike the Beatles, that can get people annoyed/frustrated/defensive/confused with/by you faster than telling them that you don't drink. People don't like that-- people who drink, that is. You're immediately viewed as judgmental, prudish, immature, and/or intolerant at best. I'm sure some people who choose not to drink are some or all of those adjectives. That's a shame. I personally couldn't give a shit about what people do as long as they're not getting behind the controls of a car or an airplane or a bulldozer or even a mechanical bull while or after they're doing it.

Now that I'm older, now that I've dealt with having an alcoholic aunt who brought a hip flask to drink in the bathroom at our dry wedding, now that I've served for a year-and-a-half as an EMT and have seen the ravages of alcohol on the human brain and human body, well, now I don't feel so bad admitting that I don't drink. I couldn't give a firmer fuck about what people think about it. What goes in my Whisky Sour Manhattan Bacardi Daiquiri Tom Collins Martini & Gibson glass is my choice and my business.

That said, I don't quite know what my choice to not drink says about me. Not only do I not drink, I never have. I haven't been drunk before, and, from what I hear and what I've seen, I'm not sure I could be convinced that I'm missing very much. I've been outlandish and stupid and depressed and embarrassing and sloppy and giddy and annoying plenty of times, though-- no substance required. I'm sure that part of my decision to abstain is based on fear-- fear of the unknown, fear of addiction, fear of losing control, fear of... liking it. I'm also sure that part of my decision is based on pretty much entirely negative experiences with people who have been intoxicated-- from deceptive and nasty ex-girlfriends to abusive and retarded roommates, it's never been great. I've never been the beneficiary of a slightly tipsy, flat-tummied young thing with long hair, a tank-top and a belly-button ring going down on me at a party. Maybe that's what I missed.

Oh well.

I'll always have my health, my liver, my dog, my wife and my mind. I'll always have my latkes and pickles and my little joke glass.

And you.