I'll Stand Before The Lord Of Song...

I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Baby I have been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not someone who has seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a lonely Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

There was a time when you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
Remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

          -"Hallelujah"
            Leonard Cohen, Various Positions

The Pile...

Every year, my family "complains" that I buy them too many gifts for xmas.  That I spend too much money on them.

I've never really understood this, and always assumed that it came from some humble sense of insecurity they felt toward their own gifts-to-give that year.  (Which is ridiculous, of course; I have never felt anything other than overwhelmed by the volume of what we receive from them every year.)

Today, my father emailed me, and asked me, again, as he does every year, to be "modest" in my gift giving this year.  Then he said, "we know your heart is in the right place..."  Which, to me, implies that, however well-intentioned, he thinks I am doing something wrong.  When I confronted him about this, he replied:

Your heart is in the right place – you give…give…then give some more.  That’s what I mean…not wrong, just not necessary for those of us that love you and feel loved by you.  You are the most generous of us all.  Not just with your treasure Michael.  Please don’t be defensive…I love you dearly.

Dad...

I am not generous.  And this is not a sacrifice.

Every Christmas morning as a child, I remember I would come downstairs to find a pile of presents waiting for me, stacked up higher than I was tall.  That pile literally dwarfed me.  Year after year after year.

You held down two to three jobs at a time and went to school in order to provide me with that enormous pile of beautiful junk.  (Because, of course, the contents of the pile didn't matter half so much as the experience of the pile itself.)  You took out loans and lines of credit every year to afford it.  You worked hard, and you sacrificed, and you went into debt in order to give me that humungous mound of christmas treasure.

THAT is generous.  THAT is sacrifice.

I can't give anyone else that experience.  I can't even come close.  But I can try, at least.  I can do my best to give them just a fraction of that feeling of excitement and amazement that I got to grow up with.  Because that's what Christmas is to me.

Every year, I hold back, and only get half of what I want to get, or less.  I have never hurt myself financially, or gone into debt of any kind to buy gifts for my family or my friends.  I always have money left over to put away after I'm done my xmas shopping for the year.  I have never sacrificed to do this.  At least, nothing more than my time.

So, please don't think I'm being generous.  I'm only a pale mimicry of the generosity you raised me with.


ps - And I know it isn't necessary.  "Necessary" isn't the point.  If it was necessary, it wouldn't mean anything.  It is by the very fact of its un-neccesity that it is transubstantiated from a consumerist product, into a treasure that reads, "This is what you mean to me.  I Love you."

We May Just Go Where No One's Been...

This is a song about magick, life, and the endless possibilities inherent in humanity.

Black
then
white are
all I see
in my infancy.
Red and yellow then came to be,
reaching out to me.
Lets me see.

As below, so above and beyond, I imagine
drawn beyond the lines of reason.
Push the envelope.
Watch it bend.

Over-thinking,
over-analyzing,
separates the body from the mind.
Withering
my intuition,
missing opportunities and I must
Feed my will
to feel that moment.
Drawing way outside the lines.

Black
then
white are
all I see
in my infancy.
Red and yellow then came to be,
reaching out to me.
lets me see
there is
so much
more and
beckons me
to look through to these
infinite possibilities.

As below, so above and beyond, I imagine
drawn outside the lines of reason.
Push the envelope.
Watch it bend.

Over-thinking,
over-analyzing,
separates the body from the mind.
Withering
my intuition,
leaving opportunities behind.

Feed my will to
feel this moment
urging me to cross the line.
Reaching out to embrace
the random.
Reaching out to embrace
whatever may come.

I embrace my
desire to...
I embrace my
desire to
feel the rhythm, to
feel connected
enough to step aside and
weep like a widow, to
feel inspired, to
fathom the power, to
witness the beauty, to
bathe in the fountain, to
swing on the spiral, to
swing on the spiral, to

swing on the spiral of
our divinity and
still be a human.

With my feet upon the ground
I lose myself between the sounds
and open wide to suck it in,
I feel it move across my skin.
I'm reaching up
and reaching out,
I'm reaching for
the random or
whatever will bewilder me.
Whatever will bewilder me.
And following our will and whim
we may just go where no one's been.
We'll ride the spiral to the end
and may just go where no one's been.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

               -"Lateralus"
                 Tool, Lateralus

Taking It...

Picking up my computer on the way home tonight, and spending the bulk of my night setting it up again.  I'm so happy I could shit my pants!

The yang to that happy yin seems to be my SMART meeting last night.  Every time I do my "check-in" lately (what they call taking your turn to speak) I just end up feeling embarrassed, and like I made an ass of myself.  And worse, I can't tell if I really did make an ass out of myself, or if I'm just being self-conscious.  Either way, the net result is that I end up feeling like I really don't want to go to these meetings anymore.  But I don't feel like I can stop, either.

I'm really not enjoying the experience; but, then again, is this an experience that you're really supposed to enjoy?  It's about learning and getting healthy, not having fun.  And I'd really like my Tuesday nights back (I could be volunteering at the planetarium if I didn't have to do this instead, which I'd much rather do), but inconvenience hardly seems like a good excuse to stop going.  You know what's really inconvenient?  A drug habit.

And I don't know if these meetings are doing me any good.  And that's the main reason why I still feel like I have to go:  I don't know if these meetings are doing me any good or not.  If I knew for a reasonable certainty that these meetings were not helping me much, then I would feel perfectly fine with deciding to stop going.  But if I stop now, without having answered that question, then I'm just quitting; I'm just giving up.  And as much as I'm not enjoying this, and as much as I don't seem to be getting much out of it beyond embarrassment, I'd be really upset with myself if I just gave up.

I keep coming back to this lesson again and again all over my life.  I think it's one of the big things I'm trying to tackle through this process.  It's not simply about not drinking and not getting high for the next year.  What I'm really trying to do, is learn how to take it.  When my life sucks, and I'm stuck doing things that I don't want to do, and I'm unhappy with the way things are going, and there's nothing I can do to change it, then just shut the fuck up and take it.  You can't be happy all the time.  Sometimes you have to do things that you don't want to do and that make you unhappy.  And when you ease those pains with chemicals, that makes you weak.  And you come to rely on those chemicals, because you're not strong enough to simply put up with those feelings of stress and depression and unhappiness on your own.

So, I'm learning endurance here.  I'm working out my "acceptance muscle," and it's getting stronger.  I'm a lot stronger than I used to be, because I never bothered to work it out at all before.  Whenever I had to use that muscle, and whenever it got sore, I'd soothe it with the painkillers of booze, and pot - and sometimes even actual painkillers.  But now I'm using it, and working it out, and getting stronger, and learning to accept that sometimes I have to just shut the fuck up, and take it, and do what I have to do, instead of what I want to do.

Like going to these stupid fucking meetings.

In Toto Memorium...

There's a War Memorial in the middle of my town.

It's a park, actually.  It's filled with dozens of memorials, each one for a different conflict.  Apparently, it's the only park in Maryland that commemorates soldiers from every American war; from the French and Indian War, all the way to the first Gulf War.  There's even a monument dedicated to the residents of Frederick County that lost their lives fighting the Barbary Pirates.

Apparently, there are also some soldiers buried under that park.  Which I guess is fitting, considering its purpose.

I first discovered the park a few years ago, on another Walpurgisnacht, while drifting through town in the middle of the night, in my usual state of psychedelic illumination.  It was knowledge of the bodies buried there that actually drew me to investigate it; tickling my sense of ghoulish voyeurism.  But I ended up having an entirely different experience.

I imagine most people have been to war memorials at one time or another.  Living in the D.C. area, it's an especially common occurrence; I'd lost track of the number of memorials I'd been to before I'd even made it to high school.  After a while, they just start to blend into one another, and it's easy to become desensitized to their meaning.  But, usually, those are memorials dedicated to one, single, specific war or conflict.  I found that the effect of a memorial dedicated to All American War to be powerful in the extreme, even to someone as jaded as I sometimes pretend to be.

The first effect I noticed is that there are simply so many monuments in this park.  And when you realize that each one is dedicated to a different war, then you begin to get a sense of the scope of just how much of our history we have spent trying to kill other people before they could kill us.  And you can't help but start to ask yourself, Have we ever been at peace?  Is peace even a realistic possibility?  Or is it just an idealistic fantasy we tell ourselves to soothe our sense of fear and alienation in the face of a violent, hostile, uncaring world; just like "God" and "Heaven"?  (How ironic that those two concepts in particular, so often the direct cause of so many wars, are actually responsible for all wars, in a way.  Would it be so easy for us to kill one another so often, and in such numbers, and for such ridiculous reasons, if so many of us didn't believe with such absolute certainty that they wouldn't really be ending forever, but simply traveling to "a better place?"  I would wager that Life means more to the atheist, who understands its true finality.)

But then I began to wander through the monuments, one-by-one, down through the history of our wars.  The Persian Gulf War.  The Vietnam War.  The Korean War.  Each one filled with names chisled in stone.  Names of people who lived here, in my town.  Who wandered these same streets at some point in their youth.  Some who even wandered the same school hallways.  Maybe some who had even lived on my street.  Fools and Heroes, every one.  Strong, and Doomed, and so unbelievably Brave.  Braver than I will ever be.  Braver than I ever could be.  And just boys!  Just boys.  They'd only just started.  They had so much left to do.  Just boys.  How is it possible that this country, of all countries, that coddles and insulates and over-protects its children to such a ridiculous, obsessive degree, could do all of this?  Could still be doing all of this?  It is literally, staggering.

And so many names.  So many names.  The World War II memorial is the largest in the park, by far.  A wall, ten feet high, and fifty feet long.  Entirely filled with names.  Our names.  And I wandered down that memorial, reading those names, trying to take it all in.  It was almost too much.  I could barely comprehend so many people, just from my tiny little town alone(!), all fighting and dying all over the world, not much more than sixty years ago.  How could that possibly have happened?!  And this, the most moral and just of all the wars!  The one where we were most clearly combating an Evil; the greatest Evil the modern world had ever seen.  It was still almost too much to believe.  But I finally got to the end of that immense list, and the end of that long wall... and then I realized - the list of names had stopped at "L."  Oh, no, I thought, it's not possible.  But I rounded the corner of that wall to discover, to my horror, that the entire other side was filled in, as well.

It felt like a lead weight had been inserted into my chest.  It was all I could do to keep myself from breaking down into tears right then and there.  I simply could not comprehend that amount of pain and suffering, on that enormous scale.

But the memorial that affected me most, and that I will always remember, was the memorial to the soldier boys of World War I.

I've always had a bit of a fascination with WWI.  It was, by far, the most gruesome and horrible conflict that humanity has ever seen.  The brutal combination of trench warfare and the advent of modern weaponry - the machine gun, the tank, the flamethrower, the grenade, the fighter plane, chemical warfare, etc., etc. - created an environment that was, quite simply, more akin to a meat grinder than what we think of as "war."  Almost forty MILLION people killed, wounded, or missing-in-action.  By the end of the war, Europe was running out of fighting age men.  So they were drafting men as old as seventy, and boys as young as fourteen.  More meat for the grinder.

At the time, they called it "The Great War."

The memorial dedicated to this human atrocity is obviously the oldest in the park.  It's almost certainly the first one built there.  It was sculpted in the style of classic monuments, with a bronze statue of a doughboy standing atop a large, octagonal concrete base.  Onto each of the eight sides of the base has been affixed a bronze plaque, each about three feet wide by four feet tall; and each plaque is, again, a list of names.  The names are so small that they are impossible to read without climbing up onto the memorial itself.  They had to make them that small in order to fit them all on the monument.  And unlike the other monuments in the park, which list the names of everyone involved in their conflict in any way, the WWI memorial is from an earlier time in America's history - it only lists the names of the boys who never came home.  Boys from my hometown.  Dozens and dozens and dozens of them.  All slaughtered.  Gone now, even from memory.  All that's left of them are names on a plaque, that you can't even read.

As I wandered around the memorial, trying to comprehend the weight of it all, I came upon one plaque that was different from the others.  It had fewer names, and was in a larger font.  I noticed it had a title across the top that was large enough that I could it read it:

"The Negro Men of Frederick County, Who Gave Their Lives In The Great War of 1917"

I've been sitting here for fifteen minutes, trying to come up with my response to that; to sum up how it made me feel then, or how I feel about it now.  I'm sorry, but I can't.  I just don't have the words.  I guess I should try to concentrate on feeling grateful that they were even included in the memorial at all.

I'll leave you with this thought for this Memorial Day.  Sums up my feelings pretty well.

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.  And while you're out there, barbequing, and sunbathing, and partying - try to be good to someone.  Just because you can.

And just because, it's something.

Holiday Post...

Finally missed a post.

I took May Day off from all responsibility.  Just wanted to relax and enjoy ourselves, and not have to worry about doing anything other than what we wanted.  And yesterday was one of those days where writing something felt more like an obligation than anything else, so I took the day off.  Kinda sad for the loss of my perfect record, but other than that I don't feel bad about it.  We'll see if it turns out to be the beginning of a downward slide, though.

Walpurgisnacht went well.  We had a fun time, and we had it together, which was really nice.  But there was nothing profound or life-changing about the experience, sadly.  Well, maybe there was one thing.

I kept getting this feeling throughout the night.  This feeling that this was my last trip.  Or, one of the last, at least.  I just kept feeling, "I'm done.  I've done this.  It's fun and everything, but I'm not getting anything out of it anymore.  It's become more work than it's worth.  I've put this tool to good use throughout my life, and it's helped me a great deal.  Helped me to become the person I am today.  But I don't think I have any use for this tool anymore.  I think it has served its purpose, and it's time for me to do other things."

Maybe that's why I felt so strongly that I had to do it this one last time, even though it seemed so counter-indicated.  And regardless, maybe it'd be healthy for me to think of it that way.

I can't wait to see what this next year brings.

Göd Hexennacht...

Walpurgisnacht begins at Sunset.  And I have to say, I'm a little nervous.

Maybe "nervous" isn't the right word.  Maybe "anxious" would describe it better.  I know that "worried" isn't correct.  Because it's not that I'm concerned that anything bad will happen.  It's just that I don't know what to expect.  I know that something big will happen, and that I will be very different tomorrow than I am today, but I don't have a clear idea how, exactly.  And that fear of the unknown, combined with the anticipation of the event itself, always gives me a bit of a "butterflies in the tummy" feeling beforehand.  It's also a feeling of exhilaration, which is, of course, almost indistinguishable from anxiety.  I guess we sometimes refer to this feeling as "nerves" or "jitters."

I'm also a bit more excited than usual this time around, because there are some bigger things going on this year than usual.  This night will mark the beginning of a year-long period of monasticism and self-sacrifice for me.  And while I'm looking forward to that, it's also a scary thing to face on some levels.  What if I have a horrible year because of this decision?  What if it's too hard?  What if it's too painful?  What if I fail?

But there's joy to balance that out, as well.  An unexpected benefit of Her recent unemployment, is that she is now free to celebrate with me tonight.  Which, I have to admit, I think I'm looking forward to more than anything else.  Things have been weird, and kind of difficult, and distant, and more than a little unpleasant between us for a while now.  I've changed a lot, suddenly and drastically, in the past couple of months.  And that's a hard thing to adjust to - when your partner is suddenly such a completely different person.  And especially so if adjusting doesn't happen to be one of your strong suits.  I imagine she must feel pretty lonely right now.  And the particular ways in which I've changed haven't exactly made me easier to live with, either.  Though maybe "easy" isn't the right word.  I don't know.  I definitely don't think I'm as much fun as a I used to be, that's for sure.

So, I'm finding that I'm really, really excited about sharing this experience with her tonight.  Excited by the possibility of re-connecting with her in some way, in any way, beyond the merely superficial mechanics of our cohabitation.  Of sharing ourselves, again, in a poignant and reflective space, in a true and meaningful way.  I know that we will both be happier after tonight.  And I have the expectation that we will be happier in a specific way, but I'm also aware that isn't necessarily true - it could go either way.  But whether the experience brings us closer together, or drives us further apart, I know that we will both feel better about our selves, and about each other.

Will us Luck.  Göd Hexennacht and Happy May to you all.  Be safe tonight.

We'll see you on the other side.

The Night of Walpurgis...

Believe it or not, meditation isn't always relaxing.

Sometimes, there is no void.  Sometimes, there is instead a flood of creative energy.  Sometimes, meditation can be almost overwhelmingly stimulating.

And today was one of those times.

The rush of ideas was so intense that I could barely concentrate on my breathing, and frequently lost focus.  And count - I counted to 108 breaths, but I'm sure I actually breathed twice that many.  And the inspiration was as varied as it was relentless.  I had ideas for stories I want to write, people I want to contact and the reasons why and the things I want to say to them, projects I want to work on and how I want to go about them, reminders, notes, insights and realizations of every sort.  For a while, try as I might to ignore it and focus on counting my breaths, I was even aware of this very post writing itself out in my head.  But the biggest and most immediate idea that occurred to me during this creative blitzkrieg, and the subject of this entry, is how I'm going to handle the Walpurgisnacht.

So, I had my last drink this past Sunday, and I had my last toke the Sunday before that (that's a story for another post), though it's been many months since I've smoked on a regular basis.  The plan was/is to spend a full year completely sober for the first time in my adult life.  This is something I've known I needed to do for a long time.  I'm a particular kind of addict (I'm sure there's a word for it, but I don't know what it is) - I can be addicted to this for awhile and then put it down, and then be addicted to that for awhile and then put it down, and so on.  I don't really have a drug of choice, per se, though I do have preferences, and there's some drugs I absolutely can't stand.  But what I'm actually addicted to, is getting high, however that happens.  When I quit smoking cigarettes, I compensated by smoking more pot.  When I quit smoking pot, I compensated by drinking more.  And I always knew I was robbing Peter to pay Paul, but at the time Paul was the one threatening to break my kneecaps, so I just told myself I'd deal with Peter later.  But I'm getting older now, and feeling more mortal by the day, and it's time to finally deal with my addictive behavior at the root, rather than dealing with any given addiction to a particular substance one at a time.

But there are some other reasons to do it, as well.  Purely from a health perspective, it'd just be good to give my body a bit of a rest from all the punishment I've put it through the last twenty years or so, now that I'm getting older.  It's also partly an experiment - I just want to see what will happen if I stay completely sober for a year.  It's partly to give my brain chemistry a chance to return to some semblance of normal, and then to re-evaluate and see how I feel, and who I feel I am.  And in part it's also a test - I want to see if I can do this.

Ok, so what does all that have to do with Walpurgisnacht?  The night of April 30th*, aka Walpurgisnacht, or Hexennacht, or Witches' Night, or May Eve, is a very important holy day on the Heathen calendar.  It is the counterpart to Yule, the holiest season of the year, and marks the other pole of the ancient pagan year (the two holidays being approximately six months apart).  As during Yule, it is believed that the barriers between the material world and the spirit world are more permeable on the Night of Walpurgis.  The Eddas (ancient Heathen holy epic lore-poems that comprise much of our knowledge of their religion and culture) tell us that it was on Walpurgisnacht that Odin earned the knowledge and power of the Runes.  He stabbed himself through the chest with his spear, pinning himself upside-down to the World Tree, Yggdrasil, and hung there for nine nights.  On the ninth night, May Eve, he "died" as much as a god-creator can, his consciousness leaving his body and descending to the three wells at the root of the World Tree, wherein he found and took up the Runes.

I know that I hung on a windy tree

nine long nights,

wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,

sacrifice self to myself,

on that tree of which no man knows

from where its roots run.

No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,

downwards I peered;

I took up the runes, screaming I took them,

then I fell back from there.

                                      -Runatal ("Odin's Rune Song")
                                        The Havamal


It is also the night before May Day (hence "May Eve"), which is, of course, the generative fertility holiday of Spring that gives us Easter and Beltane and all of the other "sex and babies" holidays associated with this time of year in the West.  And so for all of these reasons, Walpurgisnacht is traditionally associated with magick and sorcery (magick, like sex, being another form of creation).

For almost ten years now, I have celebrated Walpurgisnacht in the same way:  enjoying a specific psychedelic sacrament, and performing all manner of sorcery and divination and psycho-spiritual exploration until the Sun comes up on May Day.  So that's put me in a bit of a dilemma regarding how to celebrate this year.  Because I don't want to break this spiritual tradition that I have kept for so long now, but I also don't want to fail at staying sober almost immediately after I've started.  And it's further complicated by the fact that, though I realize it is technically a drug, and would affect my neurochemistry in the exact way I'm trying not to do right now, I really do not view this particular experience to be at all related to what I'm currently attempting to avoid.  What I'm struggling with right now is regular, recreational drug-use, and this is neither of those things.  This is not a fun, pleasurable drug that makes me feel good so that I want to do it all the time.  This drug is an intense, exhausting, highly spiritual experience for me, and more often than not Walpurgisnacht is the one and only time I'll do it all year.  It is impossible to get addicted to it, and I have never craved it.  So, while treating it the same as booze and pot might not be comparing apples and oranges exactly, it certainly doesn't feel like comparing oranges to oranges, either.  More like oranges to tangerines, perhaps.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and it's been weighing on my mind heavily.  My gut, my sense of flow, my sense of my Tao was telling me to go through with it, but when it comes to my instincts telling me to use drugs, it's hard to tell whether it's really my Tao or my addiction masquerading as such.  And I've spent so long training myself to ignore that voice inside me telling me to get high, and I'm focused so much on doing that right now, that even though I felt so strongly in my heart and my gut that it was the right thing to do, in my mind it's seemed like a death-sentence.  But when I examine my feelings, I really do not want to drink or get high right now, which leads me to believe that my desire to do this must be about something more than that.  But then again, "Denial is how it kills you," and I've learned to never let myself accept even the possibility of living in denial.  And so lately I've been leaning towards a compromise, wherein I celebrate the holiday as normal, only minus the sacrament.  It seemed like the only way to do it, really, but it left me feeling very sad for the loss of this unbroken chain of tradition (almost ten years!) and I just could not shake the feeling that I was doing something wrong.

But now I know what to do.  In that lightening storm of ideas that assaulted me during my meditation, it hit me.  And, as so often seems to happen with those "Eureka!" moments, the solution seems so obvious now that I cannot believe I couldn't see it earlier.

I will stay sober from now until Walpurgisnacht, as planned.  And I will celebrate that night, as usual, as I have so many years before.  And then I will start counting my one year of sobriety from the next day, May Day, the day of birth and re-birth and life and renewal.  I'm not really losing anything by restarting my year-countdown on May Day (oh, woe is me, I had to stay sober one year and two weeks minus one day, instead of just one straight year - waah), and I'm gaining a lot more in return.  And the spiritual meaning of it all lines up so nicely:  my year of sobriety, a year of monasticism and self-sacrifice, will span from Walpurgis to Walpurgis, the holy day celebrating self-sacrifice for the acquisition of power and wisdom; and it will begin on May Day, the holy day celebrating life and love and creation.  And having this period of sobriety line up with my spiritual model so well will give me another powerful incentive to see it through, and will significantly increase my chances of success.

It's perfect.  And in my heart, I feel it's true.  I feel it in my gut.  And I feel it too, in my head.  It all lines up.  It all feels right.  It flows, finally.

To sacrifice Self to my Self, with no drink from a horn, until screaming, I fall back from there.

This is my Tao.

...

*corrected from 31st - duh - 4/23/12

Kentucky's Finest...

I had my last drink of bourbon for a good, long while last night.

Made sure it was a good one to go out on, too.  Pappy Van Winkle's 12 year-old Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, Special Reserve.  Charred oak and molasses, with some notes of vanilla on the finish.  A damn fine whiskey.  I'm not really going to miss much about drinking during this upcoming period of personal prohibition, but I am really, really going to miss bourbon.

And it honestly has nothing to do with the drunk of it.  When it comes to the inebriation of the drink, bourbon is hardly my favorite.  I don't hate it, but it just makes me kind of relaxed and sleepy; it's nothing special.  When it comes to drinking for the feeling of it, I much prefer vodka, tequila, red wine, or even scotch over bourbon.

No, what I'm going to miss about bourbon, is the taste.  It's the only alcohol I drink almost entirely just for the taste of it.  (Though a fine cognac can be really delicious, as well.)  It's the taste of a Summer's night at the cabin by the lake.  Woodsmoke and caramel.  Oak and cedar and hazelnut and charred barleycorn.  To me, the taste of a good bourbon - and I'm talking a good bourbon here, not Jim Beam or Bullitt or some rotgut like that - is one of life's greatest pleasures.  And I know this Summer is going to feel the lesser for its absence from my palette.

But I'm prepared for that.  And I'm okay with it.  Because what I'm going to gain through this sacrifice is worth a lot more to me.  Giving up one pleasure, temporarily - even one that I enjoy as much as I do a glass of Kentucky's finest - is a ridiculously small price to pay to stop feeling like a drunk.

Wish me luck.