The Powerstance Of A Boozy Summertime

A Conversation Between Myself And Two Small Children At A Fourth Of July BBQ

Small Child # 1: "What are you drinking?"

Me: "Campari and Orange Juice."

Small Child # 1: "Is Campari alcohol?"

Me: "It is; it's a kind of Italian bitters."

Small Child # 1: "Is the orange juice because it tastes bad without it?"

Me: "I wouldn't say bad, but it's kind of bitter and the orange juice is kinda sweet, and it's, like a lot of things, kind of an acquired taste, so."

Small Child # 2: "My dad eats bad dreams!"

Me: "Your dad eats bad dreams? what is he, some kind of psychic vampire? that's terrifying."

Small Child # 2: "He eats bad dreams and then he eats alcohol!"

Small Child # 1: "You can't eat alcohol, not unless you freeze it or something."

Me: "Or make it into jello, I guess."

Small Child # 1: "And anyway, nobody drinks just alcohol."

Me: "Sure they do. I do."

Small Child # 1: "But I heard alcohol is poison."

Me: "Well, yeah, it is. That's sorta how it works, actually."

Small Child # 1 (with incredulous look on his face): "So it's a poison? That makes you feel happy."

Me: " . . . That's . . . well, actually that's exactly what it is, yes."

Small Child # 2: "My dad eats bad dreams and alcohol and then he turns it into jello and puts it in his hair and then he eats his hair!"

Me: "Your dad may have an eating disorder called 'Pica'"

Small Child # 2: "And he's SO STINKY!!"

Me: "It's hardly surprising, considering his diet."

Well, There Goes MY New Year's

Somebody Remind Me About This In June, Because Right Now It Just Seems Cruel

It Does Not Matter How Old This Video Is, It Is Still Great

So, look: I know how old this is and I know how many times you've seen it. I, too, have seen it that many times. It is still hilarious and the best. 

PSA: A Danger Of Daydrinking

These Are The Rules You Must Live (Summer) By

Esquire's rules for summer drinking are now assigned as summer vacation homework for all of you.

Ginlemonade And A Conversation About Death

I'm that sort of person who much admires hammocks, but finds them sort of uncomfortable when lying in one and trying to drink from a long straw inserted in a tall cocktail.

Similarly, I cannot quite manage to relax while lying on a blanket in the grass because I spend very nearly eighty percent of the time scanning the blanket for insects.

After one has taken the time to spread a large blanket out on the grass and has gone back and forth into the house several times to bring out and place carefully beside that blanket such things as a small stereo, a large book, and a mason jar filled with would appear, to the untrained eye, to be lemonade, but was, in actuality, almost entirely Plymouth gin, one feels silly to spend the entire afternoon sitting crosslegged and swiveling sharply to and fro, flicking insects (and bits of backyard flotsam that resemble insects) from the blanket instead of, you know, lying on it.

So, you make a go of it, mostly for the neighbors' sake, lying first on your back and holding the book above your head at arm's length like the steering wheel of a car pointed at the sun. But that grows tiresome quickly and you shift to your side. But then your leg is asleep and so you move to your stomach. But you can't really enjoy this either because you can't concentrate on a book when you are devoting so much of your mental capacity to reminding yourself not to kick your legs up at the knee and rock them gently back and forth like a teenaged girl does on television when lying on a bed and talking on the telephone.

So I was rather happy to receive the phone call from my friend, because it gave me an entirely plausible excuse to sit up straight and flick studiously at anything that looked like it had crawled or would like to have crawled near to me on the blanket, hoping for a summer home in the inside of my pantleg.

"So guess where I'll be living this summer," said the friend.

" . . . " said I, wittily.

"In a small apartment above an art studio!" said the friend.

"That's nice. I bet it hardly ever smells like failure if you keep the windows open," said I.

"There is a pond out back!"

"Ponds are nice; they give the mosquitoes somewhere to be from."

"It's only going to cost us a couple hundred dollars a month, because the lady who owns the gallery needs the money. It's kind of a sad story, actually; she's a ceramics artist."

"That IS sad."

"Oh, shut up. Anyway,  she married her highschool sweetheart, a painter . . . "

"Oh, god. Stop. I don't want to hear any more."

"And he was also a forensic scientist."

"Nope. Don't want to know."

"And they opened up this gallery and had two beautiful daughters."

"Yep. Good Story! Definitely that's the end of the story, because that is obviously a good story, right there, all wrapped up and narratively satisfying. Let's talk about something else now and not belabor it."

"And then, one morning, he's just dead."

"Better than one evening, amirite?"

Spied a spider the size of a smallish fried egg on the open page of my book. Gestured at it so that it would leap onto the blanket where I will never find it again. Will have to burn blanket later this evening.

"They were married for 34 years, were madly in love, had this business together . . . "

"And now she has to rent a room to you fuckmonsters just to make ends meet. Why did you tell me this story?"

"Well, we'll just have to fuck quietly when the gallery is open."

"Jesus."

"She sculpts these forest goddess statues. They're a bit dreamcatchery, actually, but pretty."

"Forest goddessing is, like gibson martinis and creative writing classes, generally better in theory than in practice."

"What are you, drunk?"

"I am what many intolerable people are but all decent people aspire to be: well read, unemployed, and moderately soaked through with gin."

I flicked a large and frantic ant even then struggling to scramble onto my leg thousands of millimeters across the yard.

"Listen," said the friend, "coffee Friday?"

"Yes," said I.

The usual pleasantries exchanged, I returned to my book and blanket and afternoon. I went for a large swill of my ginlemonade and found an expired gnat floating among icebergs on a yellowish sea.

Waiter, what's this gnat doing in my ginlemonade?

He's sinking to the depths of the mason jar when you insert a finger to try to fish him out, sinking to the the Davey Jones' Locker reserved for those fortunate gnats who drown in alcoholic drinks every summer.

Sod it. I'm going inside.

I Say, What?

I Am a Double Agent for Love

Went to my pal Doug's birthday party the other night. He has (and many of his friends have) kids and the kids were invited.

Because of how I am, I spent most of my evening with the vodkas and tonics and the kids.

At one point, I was invited upstairs to see the Lego "drop ships" Doug's son had constructed. We were quickly followed by the three other boys at the party, who had factionalized against the girls and were determined to find weapons and armor.

"What team are you on?" I was asked.

"I'm on the girls team," said I "I'm not a moron."

"What team are you on?" and a Nerf brand machine gun was pointed at my face.

"Boys team. Boys team," said I.

I asked what the plan was. The tallest of them said it was to write a Valentine to Doug's daughter. I told him it seemed like a good plan. He had construction paper and a pencil. I looked over his shoulder while he composed his message. The other boys were busy strapping whatever plastic items they could find to their chests and arms.

Here, with his name changed to protect his dignity, is the entirety of what the tall boy wrote in his Valentine:

Kevin Like Pie
Kevin Like Pie
Kevin Like Pie
Kevin Like Pie
Kevin Like Pie
Kevin Like Pie

I mentioned to him about a job I thought he would be well suited for as the winter custodian of the Overlook Hotel, but he was too engrossed by the elaborate folding and packaging his Valentine then required.

Later, after refilling my vodka tonic and rejoining the girl's team (as I said - not a moron), I asked Doug's daughter how the Valentine had played. She pitched her head forward, slumped her shoulders, dropped the tip of the sword she was carrying to the ground, rolled her eyes as hard as she possible could and said in her most exasperated tone:

"I just threw it away."

I told her that it was probably for the best, as he seemed rather disturbed. I suggested the possibility to her that "Pie" was a cipher for her and that he was wooing her with metaphor. She cocked her head at me and gave me an expression of impatience and disbelief.

"He's an idiot," she said.

"You realize that this is like a microcosm of the next fifteen years of his life, right?"

"I don't care. All he wrote was 'I Like Pie'. Ugh."

"Yeah, you're right I suppose," I conceded, "but go easy on him, okay?"

She just rolled her eyes again and went back to the living room to collect the Nerf gun that someone had carelessly left unattended on the sofa.

Romance!

A quick update before I hop into the shower to have a drink. (who's gonna know?)

Chiara and I have apparently reached a point in our relationship where, when she comes home from work on Valentine's Day and finds me wearing pants, she asks me "Deed you go somewhere today?" in a suspicious tone.

I told her I had to get dressed for when the police came.

Sir! Sir! You've Forgotten Your Debilitating Addiction!

On my way back home with my new TiVo, I saw a funny little tableau while stopped at an intersection.

A woman in a green apron was rushing out of a sandwich shop in the way that you do when you are trying to catch the person who just left their credit card on the counter when they walked out with their sandwich.

She called out repeatedly after a man who then stopped and turned to allow her to close the distance between them.

The man was clearly either a homeless person or a method actor gearing up to play a homeless person.

When the woman finally caught up to him I saw what she was racing to return to the man. It was a nearly full bottle of bottom shelf vodka. The woman held it like a dog turd for which she did not bring a plastic baggie, between two fingers and held away from her body at arm's length.

The man grasped the bottle with two hands, reverently, and thanked the woman profusely, as if it had not been his already and was, instead, some unanticipated gift.

I wish I could have heard them talking or seen the end of the encounter, but the light finally changed and I was off, taking my hopefully dead-behind-the-eye new TiVo home to begin its new life of recording slavery.

Cancun: My Father's Jokes Go Unappreciated

At dinner last night, Tim and my father and I all ordered Margaritas.

I opted for the Cadillac with Don Julio reposado tequila. Those other two got the house.

Good luck explaining to them about the bottle of Pancho Villa-wouldn’t-piss-in-it tequila they ordered. Anyway.

The waiter brings the drinks: Pinot Grigio for my mother. Coke for my sister. Coke for Chiara. Then he places my drink in front of me and announces it (as it deserved):

“the Cadillac, Señor.”

When he goes to place my father’s leper of a margarita before him, my father chimes in loudly:

“Ford!”

The waiter pauses in mid-action, the watery concoction disguised as a margarita suspended mere inches from the tabletop. He looks at my father.

“Ford!” my father again cries out, beaming at the poor waiter.

We all sit still as statues, confused or petrified; no one has the foggiest idea what we should be doing.

“Chevy!” my father yells.

By now, people at other tables - human resource managers in town for conventions, families of Iowans just vomited forth from cruise ships, chain-smoking New Yorkers happy to have someone other than the waitstaff to sneer at - are all pausing in their conversations, forks arrested halfway to mouths, to stare at our table.

And still the waiter holds that drink above the table in front of my father, perplexed.

And still my father beams his toothy smile.

“Cadillac.” says my father, gesturing at my margarita.

“Chevy! Ford!” he exclaims, pointing at his, still hovering before him in the waiter's hand.

With a sigh of either final comprehension or relief, the waiter chuckles briefly if unconvincingly and quietly and places the margarita in front of my father and then hands the other to Tim.

I take a deep breath and resolve to eat quickly.

A Smell of Satisfaction Prevails Throughout

Bertrand Russell relates a story told by William James:

A man found that whenever he was under the spell of ether he knew the secret to the universe but, when he came out of it, the secret was lost to him. Finally, after enormous effort and many failed attempts, he was able to write it down one afternoon after it came to him from the ether. When he had slept off the effects of the drug, he looked to his note. It read: A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.

I don’t know about that, but a bottle of port is a delicious companion on a lazy afternoon.

It also does wonders for the sounds of a melismatic travesty wafting in from another room when one’s wife is watching American Idol and one is trying to listen to the Luna album Penthouse.

By tradition, port is always passed to the left around a table (to port, as it were). If ever the passing is suspended, it is considered bad form to ask the person then possessing the bottle for the port directly. Rather, one should ask the person who has the bottle whether they know the Bishop of Gloucester (or anywhere else). If they reply that they do not, one should then inform them that the Bishop is a nice fellow, but he never remembers to pass the port.

It seems unclear what one ought to do if the person so queried does, in fact, know the Bishop of Gloucester (or anywhere else). Engage him in a conversation about bishoping?

Alternatively, you might switch to a drink that is less fussy about decorum.

Barring that:

Try the Fonseca 20 year old Tawny or the Taylor Fladgate 10 year or the Dow's Colheita.

Please enjoy them with a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

A Midnight Monte Cristo

In the summer, the nights could be so hot that I took to storing my pillows in the refrigerator during the day and only removing them just before bed. The cool touch of the fabric never lasted for more than a few minutes in the balmy night air, but the momentary relief more than justified the diurnal struggle to replace a carton of milk or a summer sausage in the cramped confines of the icebox.

The time that Webber arrived at my house looking for a place to store his last remaining fifth of potable bourbon it was so hot that the label peeled from the bottle of its own accord. A tequila or port man, I could be counted on not to imbibe the sweet dark, liquor while he was at work, and certainly his family had no cause to suspect me of hiding his contraband, so I was often his cache man in this way in those days.

At the door, I nodded my assent and Webber went to cram the bottle into my fridge, tucking it into the fold of the goose-feather pillow.

Dunn was over already and had some lines he wanted me to look at.

I was happy for him. It had been several weeks since I had been able to get anything on paper and I went pouring over his thin, recalcitrant penmanship, barely suppressing my envy.

But, following my personal mandate to reveal whatever might be concealed by more or less confident men, I immediately mentioned my envy to Dunn and he laughed that great, ejaculating laugh of his that it took me several years to believe was not a fake.

Webber ambled out onto the veranda and leaned against the entryway, eating pecans that he picked in twos and threes from his pocket. He had had some success with a dusky brunette in the previous week and I asked him about her. He deflected the question, which meant he had either slept with her or hadn’t. He stuffed another pecan in his mouth and Dunn scratched my cat - the white one - under the chin.

I told Dunn the lines were good; something about cars and rivering waterways. I resolved to Joyceify some of my own stuff and see what came of it.

We discussed without seriousness the merits of some cafés within walking distance and finally decided to drink the bourbon and be done with it.

Later, some puritan girls came by and we pretended to make sexual overtures at them and they pretended to be offended. Webber smoked his Monte Cristo cigar and Dunn spoke jubilantly of eggs, and after comparing a nondescript couple walking by on the sidewalk to a Duras novel, he admonished them to “look it up sometime.”

Eventually Webber had to get home and Dunn, too, said his goodbyes and ambled off in the wrong direction - drunk into his Falstaff persona. I shut my door to the sound of him screaming at invisible suburbanites or submarines, I could not tell which.

The girls had left hours or minutes before and I fell asleep on the sofa trying to play my old ukulele, the one missing the top string.

The last thing I remember was deciding that I would remember the astonishing idea I had for a short story without writing it down. In the morning I had forgotten all but the memory of the idea.