Tag: rambling

Routine

250ml Sicilian Nero d’Avola.

Like I mentioned, I had a drinking routine.

I would come home from work, make and photograph a Savoy Cocktail.

Attempt to get it blogged.

My wife would then get home from her work, and we would have a beer together.

After which, we would go out for dinner.

One of our favorite local pizza places is always busy and we’ve been going since it opened. As there is always a wait, the establishment let’s you hang out in a nearby bar and then they come and fetch you when your table is ready. We’d usually have another beer and play some pinball.

Well, they take the excuse to leave work and get a shot of Fernet, Jaeger, or Tequila at the bar, then tell you your table is ready. It’s a cozy arrangement.

So, by the time we’re finally in the restaurant and our salad arrives, we’re feeling pretty toasty. Of course, we then order a bottle of wine to split while we enjoy our dinner.

In January, I was trying not to drink, and so my wife just got wine by the glass. “Oh that is very healthy of you,” was the comment from the waiter.

Lately, we’ve taken to not drinking before dinner and then just ordering a carafe of wine to split with dinner, instead of a bottle. The waitress was downright Sarcastic with her comment about Carafes vs Bottles the last time we were in.

And it’s not even that they are grumpy that we are spending less, as often they would just charge us for two glasses, and serve us a whole bottle.

It’s like we’re letting them down. And, of course, they are now charging us full price for a carafe of wine.

No Drinking Alone

Seems like a no-brainer, eh?

However, my method for the entire Savoy Project was to get home from work and get a drink made, photographed, and blogged before my wife got home from work.

Early on, especially when I would attempt more than one drink in a night, (hey, I don’t like to waste,) this was a disaster.

As relationship mistakes go, unbalanced levels of inebriating substances being consumed has to be right up there in the top 10.

Being mostly in the bag before your significant other gets home from work is kind of a disaster.

Heck, the opposite is even challenging, one partner trying to stay sober, while the other doesn’t quite feel as urgent a need for sobriety.

Well, anyway, the new rule is, no drinking alone, and it is a good one.

Ease of Use

When I was younger, I used to make Cassette mixes to impress girls I thought were cool.

This meant sitting next to my stereo, picking individual songs off of vinyl albums, playing them, and recording them to cassette in real time.

A cassette was/is 60 or 90 minutes long.

Aside from the planning effort, written longhand, this meant an effort of, say, a minimum of a couple three hours just to make a single mix tape.

Now, I feel like I am lucky to find the time to rip a few CDs to MP3.

Where did the time go?

Wake Up in the Morning

“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.”

Attributed to Frank Sinatra.

On the other hand, lately, I’ve been feeling the complete opposite.

I feel sorry for people who do drink, knowing how bad they will feel the next morning.

One of the problems I’ve been hitting lately, is, as I’ve gotten older, recovering from just about anything takes longer. Being sick, physical activity, drinking too much…

Where when I was young, a little sleep and a lot of water would cure a slightly excessive night of drinking. As I’ve grown older, it takes longer and longer to recover back to normal.

It seems like people either choose to skip normal, and keep drinking, or choose to skip imbibing.

If I want to continue to get back to being a base-line normal human being, somewhere there has to be a point of diminishing return, and I do like feeling alert and “normal”.

Drink as Little as Possible

Around my birthday, last year, I realized I had been drinking for 30 years. Since I was 18. Whew.

The broken bottle and the damage done, eh?

Since this realization, off and on, I’ve been trying to drink as little as possible.

Generally, this hasn’t worked well.

Started the less drinking project October-ish, then there was my birthday and Portland Cocktail Week. I was cut a break when Heaven’s Dog closed in Oct/Nov, and peer pressure was reduced to drink on a semi-weekly basis. Re-started the project, and then there were the holidays. In January, I finally got around to drying out for a few weeks, then I got invited to England to visit the Savoy Hotel. In February, to Boston for a cocktail event.

Then started working behind the bar regularly at South in the SF Jazz center.

Even leaving aside peer pressure from fellow bar staff, there is always an excuse to drink.

I was reading Roger Ebert’s memoir, not to put any spoilers out there, but in his 20s and 30s he drank to excess with the rest of the Chicago newspaper scene at The Goat and O’Rourke’s. Eventually, he decided he was an alcoholic and joined AA. When he joined AA, his sponsor gave him a drug that would make drinking very unpleasant, “If you are able to drink, it is only your will, and will always fails,” or words to that effect.

Without drink, he went on to live a fairly productive late life, with adopted children and a wonderful, supportive wife. Film festivals, TV show, etc.

For most of my life, I feel like, and this is my perception, that I’ve managed to keep drinking in its box. It has never cost me a job or a relationship. I’ve never lost a weekend, or a week, to a bender.

On the other hand, I’ve always been lucky to have friends or loved ones to bail me out from periodic lost nights. Shove me in a cab with some money, or help me get into my pajamas.

When you’re young, binge drinking seems fun. However, at some point, you just become a drunk old guy, instead of an enthusiastic, youthful, partier.

I was looking at a photos of older men, who still try to sport the stubble look. It’s like that. At some point, you just look like a rumpled old man who didn’t have time to shave, instead of a youthful bon vivant.

I feel like that now, I’m old enough I should have learned to drink well, like the quintessential Italian man. To drink enough to enjoy life, but not enough to be drunk in public.

But, I haven’t, and I still manage to occasionally get embarrassingly drunk.

Maybe 30 years of drinking is enough.

Sleep Dirt

The debris left over from night, which I encounter on my morning dog walks.

Candy wrappers, drug baggies, liquor mini bottles, half pints, chip bags, cigarette butts, used condoms, hypodermics, dog shit.

The Sleep Dirt of an insomniac San Francisco.

Rustling, wrestling, and night sweating.

Day dreaming away the night.

Analog Blues

It’s not the sharpness of digital images and movie projection that bothers me, it’s the way the technology handles the out of focus areas of the screen.

For me, the artifacting, ugly squares, and other pukey patterns formed in the indistinct areas of the projected image distracts me from what is being projected.

Like the compact disc, there is an arbitrary level, after which detail is discarded, and that sudden dropoff can be disconcerting.

Hello world!

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