It's 5:00 AM. It's either too damn early or too damn late, depending on whether you even bothered going to bed. This is an hour for energetic young people or downtrodden folks with terrible jobs who have to be up this early. But you, you're only up because you have to catch a plane. Chemicals will help you get through the day and they'll probably all be legal, but that doesn't change the fact that going through travel clean no longer seems plausible.
So, you fill your veins with caffeine to stay awake and it keeps you alert through the esoteric absurdities of air travel. Through some bureaucratic magic you get your boarding pass and scramble through security feeling the exposure and general wrongness of having your shoes off in public. You sweat into your shirt and you feel suspicious just by merit of x-ray machines and metal detectors. You rush not because you're in a hurry but because there are people behind you. When it's all said and done, there's still an hour to kill before you even board.
And so, the terminal bar waits. It waits with overpriced beer, call brand liquor you never drink at home and news programs you never watch. It's one beer or one scotch or something else warm and the false feeling of erudite adulthood that comes with field reports from Afghanistan and a newsstand copy of Esquire you pretend you find interesting. But it's all just there to make your eyelids heavy and get you buzzed enough to not be bored and restless in your coach seat.
Sly bastards, those airlines. They know if you're willing to sip liquor at 10:00 AM then you're willing to pay through the nose for a pitiful ounce of whiskey mid-flight when the buzz starts to wear off. You take trips to the bathroom to break up the monotony and because you'd rather not dilate the flight time any more than necessary by being uncomfortable. When that cart comes rolling down you tell yourself you'll just get some cran-apple. Who are you kidding? You're living in the age of discount tickets bought two months in advance on the Internet. Of course you'll spring for another jacked-up Jack-and-Coke.
Those hotel bars, they're a different story, though. They're not about changing time and mere survival. They're not about being more old-fashioned than the Xanax crowd. Hotel bars are places for escaping to, for a man and his brother to act the ass because they're not from here, for getting comfortable by chemicals around strangers because they sleep one foot from your head through a thin wall.
Or maybe your travel's better than that and the hotel bar isn't your place. Maybe your place is champagne in an ice bucket in your own suite. Maybe you've got something to celebrate, or maybe just to share. People drink at weddings and funerals. No matter the occasion, the poison tastes different than it does at home. The swimming pool chlorine in the air, or the foreign bedsheets, or the unusual view out your window. The whole world is different when traveling, so why should the booze be the exception?