These days I really only drink alcohol when I’m out of town. Course, I’m a travel journalist, so my habits hardly qualify me for the Temperance League.
And okay, fine, sometimes, even when I’m not out of town, I’ll imbibe at social functions. Fortunately for my liver, I attend as few of those as possible.
My youngest sister once told me that a good way to achieve moderation might be to drink alcohol about as often as you eat birthday cake—i.e., on certain infrequent occasions. For a while, I went around proselytizing about that method, presenting it as the Gospel According to My Brilliant Sister. I later learned she stole the birthday cake analogy from Cheryl Strayed.
But that’s okay. Strayed basically stole the notion in turn from Sesame Street’s “A Cookie Is a Sometime Food,” the theme song of the many failed interventions staged in a futile effort to reform the Children’s Television Workshop’s most inveterate addict, Cookie Monster.
For many months starting in the fall of 2023, I abstained from alcohol entirely. Amid one of my periodic health freak-outs, I became convinced the stuff was slowly but surely killing us all. I was probably right, by the way. Even so, I don’t think my teetotalism lasted a full year.
I considered following the trend of substituting alcohol with marijuana during that time—at least at major social gatherings where sobriety felt like a burden. On New Year’s Eve of 2023, for example, I ate a couple THC gummies.
But they made me introverted and watchful, arguably two of the worst qualities to have on the most extroverted and heedless night of the year. I know I wasn’t my usual talkative self because at the event I attended a friend of mine kept chanting, “Bring back Zac! Bring! Back! Zac!”
Elsewhere on the cutting-back-on-booze front, though, I do kind of like nonalcoholic beers and spirits. I’m not even sure why, seeing as how such products seem to aim for replicating the taste of alcohol with none of the fun.
And let’s face it: The taste of alcohol is not exactly its top selling point. I know taste is a subjective matter and there are plenty of mixologist types who pretend to enjoy flavors such as oak and peat and smoke. But are we sure those things actually taste good? I mean, we’re praising a drink for giving us the sensation of licking tree bark, swamp gunk, and fire?
Have mixologist types never had a milkshake?
And yet despite the efforts of zero-proof distillers to make their products taste like poison, I do prefer to drink a mocktail over, say, a club soda in situations where liquor is flowing and I’m not partaking. I have even been known to sip a buzzless margarita or Phony Negroni while having a quiet night at home.
Maybe it’s the ritual of cocktail-making that I enjoy. Maybe I’ve succeeded in psyching out my psyche to think you don’t need alcohol to have a good time. Maybe a person really can develop a taste for stuff that tastes bad.
As a matter of fact, I know that’s true. As I once wrote at this very website, “A big part of adulthood involves becoming accustomed to and then dependent on liquids you wanted to spit out the first time they crossed your lips—an ironclad law of nature that holds true with Diet Coke, coffee, beer, wine, spirits, and cum.”
As a rule, I frown on writers quoting their own writing, but I’ll make an exception this time ‘cause that particular quote doesn’t sound much like me anyway. It gets too filthy there at the end.
Unless of course I’ve lost my edge in the intervening years since I posted that cum-guzzling gag (pun intended). Do you think I’ve lost my edge?
Bring back Zac! Bring! Back! Zac!
Indirect Objects 