Drinks I Have Loved

Many of you will have heard this from me before in person, I've decided to put my thoughts down for posterity. The sad thing is, I don't know if this is using alcohol as a metaphor for my love life, or my love life as a metaphor for alcohol.

(disclaimer: these are simply musings. I do not intend to refer to any person in my past in particular. Any likeness to real persons or events is entirely coincidental.)

(disclaimer #2: I am not an alcoholic...although they do say denial is the first sign...but for me it's different...although that's what alcoholics always say....ummm...I can't win this one...)

The Drinks I have Loved:

First there was alcopops (coolers for you in North America) or some other kind of fruity drink. You're in highschool, you're young, inexperienced, and only recently got done drinking koolaid and fruit juice. This seems like the next logical step. You're too young to handle anything really serious, but you still want to feel like you're grown up. Like your highschool sweetheart, alcopops are effervescent and artificially sweetened. You feel like this will last forever. Then you graduate highschool and head off to university, a world full of new drinks. You do your best to remain true to alcopops, but you feel yourself drifting apart. You start spending more and more time with your new "friend," beer. Finally, you have a decision to make. You tell alcopops that you'll always be friends, but you gradually drift further and further apart. Now when you see alcopops on the shelf, you do little more than give a smiling nod, with little to say to one another.

Then comes beer. During your whole period of confusion over alcopops, beer was there for you. You felt like it really understood you. In the rough-and-tumble world of undergrad, at keg parties and frat parties, beer just seems like a much better match for you than alcopops ever did. You start off as friends, but gradually things develop into something much more. You find yourself settling into a kind of comfortable routine with beer, preferring to spend the night in, in front of the TV than go out. Compared to your over-the-top melodramatic relationship with alcopops, your relationship with beer is much more subdued and level. At first you like this, but then you start to wonder if perhaps there isn't more for you out there. You wonder if this is all there is to life. You start having doubts about beer, even though there isn't anything "wrong" with it per se, which makes everything so much harder. Your eyes start to wander to other drinks...

Then comes seduction by "the other drink." For some it may be some exotic latina/o like tequila, or a Russian like vodka. For me it was a high-society seduction: Martinis. Proper martinis with gin and vermouth, none of these new fandangled cocktails in a martini glass posing as martinis. No, this was old money. Martini was everything beer was not. Extravagant, exciting, spontaneous, over the top. I could scarcely resist that longer, slender-stemmed glass. You have a torrid affair with the other drink with passions running high, but this much emotion cannot sustain itself, it's bound to end, and when it does, it invariably ends in tears.

For a while you're alone and drinkless. You might even have sworn off drinks, but you're at a party one night and you bump into beer again. At first it's a bit awkward. You don't really know what to say, there's a lot of awkward silences, a lot of idle smalltalk. But eventually you start talking again, perhaps you remember a particularly fond (if perhaps a little hazy) memory you had from back when you and beer were an item, and before you know it, it's like you and beer had never parted...

Or, alternatively, your friend introduces you to her friend, chardonnay (if you like blondes) or shiraz (if you prefer red heads). Either way, you are reminded a lot of the good times you had with beer, who after being betrayed has refused to take you back. You develop the same kind of stable "friends first" relationship you once had with beer, but this time with wine, a little older, a little more sophisticated...

University is winding down. You find yourself in your final year (meaning probably your fifth or 6th year of undergrad) and much to your chagrin, it looks like you actually might have enough credits to graduate, after changing majors three or four times. You're not even quite sure what program you're in anymore. Nonetheless, you have serious decisions to make about your future, and your future with your drink. The thought of entering the real world seems so thoroughly unpalatable, and your intellectual growth so incomplete, that you decide that grad school is your only choice. Or perhaps you need to go find yourself by backpacking through Asia for a year...either way, you're moving away...

When you arrive, you find yourself alone in a strange new world. You feel isolated and alone. You make long distance calls to beer or wine to comfort yourself, but it's a bittersweet experience, leaving you melancholy and alienated. Still, you truck along, assuring yourself that this is a character-building experience, reminding yourself of the reasons you left in the first place. Then one evening, almost by accident, you stumble across "the drink." You weren't even looking for it, but there it is, a drink that makes you feel right. For me, as many of you know, this drink is bourbon. It wasn't love at first sight with bourbon, such idealistic notions can't last. Rather, it was a slow and steady building of a relationship that now sits atop a solid foundation. Without the juvenile melodrama of alcopops, the high passion-filled drama of "the other drink," or the daily mundanity of beer or wine. This drink is, as Goldilocks would have put it, just right. I think I've finally found the one, that is, "the drink." I'm ready to settle down and have little mini-bar sized bottles of bourbon to call my own. I think bourbon and I will be happy together for a long time to come...