Liquid culture fascinates me. You can tell a lot about a person by how they drink, and I really mean that. Not just what they drink, but when, where, why and by which means. For example, you'll never meet someone who both only likes super-sweet drinks and is also a respectable adult.

All kidding aside, human beings have a real connection to ethanol. It has long been a source of everything from religious inspiration to rights of passage. Though roughly a billion or so members of our species forbid the stuff, the other five usually find a way to have a very complicated relationship with alcohol. Unlike most other recreational drugs, we drink for a wider variety of reasons than the high, or addiction, or pain relief. Drinking, like the great human experiences of love and wanderlust, is strange and irrational. Mine is a complex question with as many answers as there are barstools in the world. Why do we drink?

Me, I gravitate toward the aesthetics of the tragic and ironic. It's not because I'm a particularly glum guy, which I'm not, but because there's an equalizing beauty in the realization that everybody lives with some kind of trouble. It's why we still enjoy tragic fiction. People like to watch Romeo and Juliet go off the deep end because it's cathartic, a way to face pain and dive down deep into it without actually doing any lasting damage. I think self-abusing benders are effectively the same experience, only chemical.

I make it a point to distinguish between lushes and drunks like food critics distinguish between gourmet cuisine and fast food. Drunks are sloppy and artless, having long abandoned the idea of drinking for any other purpose than just to drink. Drunks are addicts, plain and simple. Lushes, on the other hand, are people who at least make an effort to invent reasons to drink, then follow through with some kind of style. Is it any less self-destructive to be a lush? Hell no, but at least it's got some dignity.

This whole preamble is necessary to frame my thoughts on the experience of Pain Drinking. This isn't drinking to relieve pain. Rather, it's drinking for the express purpose of self-harm. Like I said, drinking is irrational, but it's not divorced from art. I acknowledge that for some of us, there are a select few days over the course of our lives that beg for the kind of drinking that is so painful it's actually kind of therapeutic. This has to be done right, though. It's a plum fool who drinks because he's sad, but it's a downright imbecile who gets pain-plastered on his favorite cocktail. Drinking far too much of things you actually like is a good way to stop enjoying those things. What's the point of that?

No, the right way to Pain Drink is to get your hands on something you know you're going to hate. The last time I set out to hurt with libations I found myself in a liquor store browsing the shelves for the worst bottle of scotch I could find. At the time, that distinction went to McClelland's Speyside. Go ahead and put that term into your favorite search engine, then promptly grab the biggest grain of salt you can find so you can take it with the reviews you'll see in the first few pages. McClelland's is a pale gold tincture of pure agony, a single malt that hates every sorry sod who ever even looked at it. I'm no smoker, but a stiff sip of this stuff makes my mouth taste like I've been inhaling Black and Milds at a rate of three per hour.

I bought and drank that bottle of McClelland's Speyside because it was on the bottom shelf and it didn't cost me a cent over $13.00. The price for this stuff has since doubled, but at the time it represented in numbers the very concept of swill. I went looking for just such a product because, for my own reasons, I had to hurt, and fast. I wouldn't wish this stuff on my worst enemy, but I'd still recommend it to a friend who needs some ethanol shock therapy.

Since that day, I haven't so much as run my ink-stained pinky over a bottle of McClelland's, but then again I haven't really had a reason to. Sadness, readers, is an awful reason to drink. People with any sense avoid doing it altogether. For the rest of us, sometimes it's necessary. If you really must hit rock bottom then keep on going with the help of a jackhammer, do yourself a favor and give the job to the sorriest bottle of hell you can find.