March 2011

The Lush Chronicles: Drink as a Drug

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If you are a drinker, you are a recreational drug user. This is an idea most drinking cultures have never been able to accept in a healthy way. Those few times in history when alcohol has been treated as an illicit substance, it has been demonized and subjected to damaging myth in lieu of scientific fact. This mostly has to do with the difficulty of forming a culture-wide perception of intoxicating substances that is mature and realistic. We feel the need to classify mind-altering substances in a variety of semantic categories so some can get away with altering minds without being perceived as "evil" or deadly. The danger of classifying alcohol as what it truly is, a psychoactive substance that people consume for the express purpose of enjoying intoxication, is that doing so forces us to approach all psychoactive substances with the same nonchalance with which we approach alcohol.

Re-evaluating Wine

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America is a young country. We forget this sometimes, especially those of us who are riding the strange, aimless ship that is this star-spangled nation. We don't have castles (not real ones) and we don't have anything but trees that are properly ancient. Nothing we do here has been going on for more than a few centuries, which is pocket change time for the rest of the world, especially on the other side of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Our attempts at culture and refinement must look quaint to those who can casually walk the streets and hills of regions that have already seen a handful of empires come and go, that have been growing produce and flowers since before America was a glimmer in the tea-stained teeth of a British colonist. All told, we've been making wine in the United States for all of 70 years, give or take, and our soil is just now starting to yield the right levels of nutrients to produce respectable stuff. For a very long time the wine that came out of the much-revered (and let's face it, overrated) Napa Valley of California was considered cut-rate swill. It's what people bought for formal events they didn't care about, what the misers of the family brought to the reunion. Guys like the Gallo Brothers made a small fortune on the cheap stuff, but before long some proper wine crafters started working on barrels of palatable potables. These days, California, Oregon and Washington make some damn decent wine, but this has led to a certain degree of snobbery about the stuff. I think we Americans need to adjust our perceptions.

The Lush's Hangover Cure

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As a lush I try to advise my friends against doing things with alcohol that will make them miserable the next day. I attempt to dissuade them from mixing drinks that will compete with one another, pounding cocktails with high sugar content and going through a night of partying on an empty stomach. But that's the rub with drunk people: They don't listen. We all have nights when we do ill-advised things, no matter how practiced we are at the art of drinking. That's why it's important to have a plan for those likely, though not inevitable, hangovers. Here's my loose collection of best practices for recovering from a night of liver abuse.

Rules of a Bar Crawl

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A long time ago in the very first city, a walled outcropping of stone long lost to history, someone had the bright idea to start selling alcohol out of a particular building. This was the first bar. Then, somewhere else in the city, somebody else had the same idea and opened up the second bar. People either went to one or the other, whether by proximity or preference, and it went this way for a long time. Then, on a particularly inspired night, a patron at one of the bars convinced his friends to walk with him to the other. This was the first bar crawl. Since then, it has been a time-honored tradition that has transcended culture to make a night of going from one alcohol-serving establishment to another in search of, if nothing else, variety. It is an understatement to say that many mistakes have been made throughout history in this practice. Don't make the mistakes of your forebears. Follow these rules to have a safe, satisfying bar crawl experience.