BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Social distancing and the single drinker.

A very timely reminder: For the past 40 years I've always tried my best, at all times and twice on Sunday, to keep at least 6 feet away from the nearest Miller Lite.

The pandemic has strengthened my resolve.

---

Let's begin with some bad news.

Farewell for now to a golden age of drinking, by Schumpeter (The Economist)

The pandemic has hurt the booze business

... Lockdown and its aftermath leaves craft firms most exposed. Some have been bought by industry giants; abi now owns Goose Island and Camden Town Brewery. But many still sell from their own small premises, making it harder to attract social-distancing customers. Even in good times many barely covered their costs. Being small, they have less leverage to force their wares onto supermarket shelves. Some will either be sold or sluiced down the drain. Inevitably, the industry will lose some of its creative fizz.

In addition, two longer-term threats loom on the horizon: demography and drugs. Studies show that Generation z, the eldest of whom have recently reached drinking age, are far less likely to consume alcohol than their elders, says Javier Gonzalez Lastra of Berenberg, a bank. That will affect the drinks industry for years to come, because peak alcohol consumption has traditionally been between the ages of 18 and 34. Partly as a result, in America, historically the world’s biggest drinks market, total alcohol sales volumes have declined for three years in a row. Overlapping with youthful sobriety is cannabis use. A report co-written by iwsr last year found that this was an emerging alternative to booze among the young. Millennials in America accounted for almost half of “dualists”, who both smoke pot and imbibe. Covid-19 could benefit cannabis further. In Schumpeter’s limited experience, pot-smoking has always been something of a furtive activity. That may make it better suited to social distancing than clinking glasses in a pub.

The good news is that a great awakening of regulatory experimentation allowed to survive pandemic states of emergency would help keep us in the game.

Hip Hops: Public drinking -- and changing “stupid American liquor laws”

Rules and regulations are inevitable in any business or profession, but the ones pertaining to beverage alcohol often are a more impenetrable thicket than most, multiplied 50 times for each state in the union, compounded by additional layers of local blue laws, and seemingly imposed for the very purpose of denying that the repeal of Prohibition ever took place.

In the same article there's a list of Louisville area breweries and their current opening status.

Food & Dining Magazine’s "Hip Hops" column is devoted to the beer beat, and an essential component for the health and well being of any city’s beer scene is its core of local breweries. In the broadest of terms, the pandemic has been kind to Louisville’s breweries. Many of ours never closed entirely during the pandemic, and others have reopened.

Here’s a status list with the (incomplete) lowdown, as assembled Sunday afternoon in the company of a tankard of Falls City Bock — and then another, after the first.

One thousand times this: "American liquor laws are pretty stupid. And the COVID-19 pandemic gives us a once in a century chance to change them."

Photo credit: The Atlantic.

A pandemic is awful, and it's also an awfully good time to make common-sense reforms.

As a preface, frequent readers will recall that I'm a hardcore atheist. This said, thank God for Andy Crouch. For a very long time he's been one of my favorite beer writers. Right now, I'd vote for him over Trump or Biden.

Quite literally I've been saying this for DECADES.

The Case for Public Drinking, by Andy Crouch (Beer Edge)

America has long relegated the consumption of alcohol to bars and restaurants. In doing so, localities have further sought to control the public’s ability to consume alcohol under stringent liquor laws. Many states and cities limit the number of alcohol sale licenses, causing an artificial and inflated market for their value. Each year, the bar, restaurant, or brewery pays a few hundred or thousands of dollars in these markets to renew their licenses, paying the fees directly to the city or state. If you want to open a new establishment in an area that has hit its limit on licenses, you either have to contemplate not serving booze—something that is rarely tenable in major markets—or you have to buy someone else’s license.

This governmental created scarcity causes the value of liquor licenses to skyrocket, often going for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the open market. And none of this profit goes to the city or state, only into the pockets of private companies and owners.

And:

As much as I would like to sit arm to arm with a complete stranger at a local bar, casually discussing local events or the weather, it’s going to be a long time before most people feel comfortable doing that.

Until we’re able to return to that kind of normalcy, assuming it can return, local and state governments should continue the creative thinking they’ve developed during the pandemic response and contemplate allowing breweries or bars to operate beer gardens in large, outdoor public settings and to relax local laws governing open containers.

With the weather improving, people want to get together while still being able to maintain proper physical distancing. Beer gardens satisfy a long suppressed hunger for open-air forums of public fun. The public should be allowed to enjoy some communality and conviviality, fresh air, and a beer or two all in the company of good friends and their restorative laughter.

The restaurant industry press has noticed, too (thanks, W) ...

Restaurants profit from looser alcohol regulations during coronavirus pandemic, by Bret Thorn (Nation's Restaurant News)

With to-go beer, wine and cocktail sales thriving, will states revise rules on booze delivery, takeout and curbside pickup permanently?

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the country, many state liquor authorities displayed uncharacteristic flexibility in loosening their regulations, allowing many restaurants to sell beer, wine, spirits and cocktails for takeout and delivery for the first time in an attempt to help those businesses survive.

Restaurateurs responded with alacrity, developing bottled cocktails and cocktail kits, launching wine discounts or even reducing their inventory of premium spirits in order to manage cash flow better.

And even as state restrictions are being lifted and restaurants gradually reopen for dine-in, many operators are hoping the added revenue stream of to-go alcohol will remain in place permanently — or at least longer into what is expected to be a slow recovery.

... as has journalists covering food and drink from the consumer's end of them.

Liquor Laws Loosen Up in the Face of Delivery-Only Dining, by Caleb Pershan (Eater)

Some states are letting restaurants turn to takeout booze to make up for lost profits

If all goes well with temporarily relaxed liquor laws, waivers could very well be extended, and conceivably made permanent. “The best case is people figure out how to do this well, and realize they could have done it lawfully this whole time... A lot of [restaurants] who might just never have thought of it might find that the condo across the street will buy $20 or $30 bottles of wine with carryout.”

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Prohibitionists see an opportunity amid COVID-19's onslaught.

But riots would violate social distancing, right?

Beer writer Andy Crouch, who is from Massachusetts:

"Liquor stores are filling growlers out of kegs in the back of a truck in customers' driveways. There are no liquor laws anymore. How we go back to "normal" after all of this is beyond me."

Here in Indiana, watching as dozens of alcoholic beverage laws vanish (temporarily) overnight has been like watching the Warsaw Pact crumble in 1989. The Indy Star explains, focusing on a key point.

Indiana, once a last bastion of blue laws, considers alcohol sales 'essential', by Chris Sikich (Indianapolis Star)

Political watchers say it's unlikely anyone had to make pleas to the governor, or at least plead very hard. Andy Downs, director of the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics, said there would be civil unrest if the government had tried to outlaw alcohol when everyone was stuck at home.

"He's doing something that both meets demand and doesn't create a new problem," Downs said.

He said (Eric) Holcomb's likely chain of thought was quite logical.

"Grocery stores are open and would have continued to sell alcohol," Downs said. "So that means liquor stores had to be an essential service too (to ensure an even playing field). And if we're trying to make sure that restaurants can survive, that means people who order food for carryout absolutely should be able to get their booze there rather than create more risk by travelling elsewhere."

According to a high-powered medical authority, it isn't so simple. Peter P. Bach says that continuing to allow the sale of alcoholic beverages during the pandemic, when people are compelled to stay at home with their loved ones, only enhances domestic violence.

Consequently, a new reason for prohibitionism.

Ban alcohol sales during the pandemic, by Peter B. Bach (Boston Globe)

Domestic violence appears to be rising and states need to shut down liquor stores until home isolation is no longer needed.

Millions are beaten and injured annually in the United States by drunken domestic partners and parents, and that is when times are good. With the economy tanking and families locked together because of stay-at-home orders to combat the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, domestic violence rates appear to be soaring. This requires an urgent response: States should immediately order the closures of liquor stores. They can reopen when home isolation is no longer needed.

And yet this: "Most adults drink rarely or not at all. Just 10 percent of adults account for 75 percent of all alcohol sold, consuming 10 or more drinks per day."

No question that confinement of families, sudden demands to oversee home schooling, precipitous job loss, and worry over an invisible viral predator are the ingredients of a toxic domestic brew. But alcohol is what turns it into a second invisible public health crisis.

Most adults drink rarely or not at all. Just 10 percent of adults account for 75 percent of all alcohol sold, consuming 10 or more drinks per day. That kind of excessive use impairs judgment, engenders anger agitation and dysphoria, and can lead to violent behavior.

Reducing access to alcohol during the crisis will reduce the frequency of home violence. Finland’s liquor store employee strike in the 1970s as well as Sweden’s curtailment of liquor store sales on certain days in the 1980s, both had that effect. South Dakota imposed twice daily sobriety breathalyzer checks for individuals with multiple arrests for drunk driving last decade. That worked too. Not only did drunk driving rates fall, but so did calls for domestic violence — both by about 10 percent.

These data could support curtailing liquor sales at any time, and reducing domestic violence was one of the motivations for the temperance movement a century ago. But our response to the coronavirus pandemic itself is what makes this move appropriate now and for the duration of home isolation, as the isolation frustrates an array of safeguards we have in place to identify domestic abuse in the first place.

The reasoning leads to a predictable place: "These data could support curtailing liquor sales at any time, and reducing domestic violence was one of the motivations for the temperance movement a century ago."

And, we recall how the temperance movement a century ago played out, eh?

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Who's Gonna Drive You Home? Gravity Head's 22nd bacchanal begins on February 28.

Gravity Head XXII (okay, right on; not the Super Bowl, so "the 22nd running") returns to the NABC Pizzeria & Public House on Friday, February 28.

As far as I know it's the usual 7:00 a.m. kickoff with breakfast and I'm weighing if I should go. After all, Bobby Knight returned to Assembly Hall.

The last Gravity Head with which I had any active participation was 2015, and yes, it's strange to think it's been five whole years. I've gone over a time or two on opening weekend Saturday, and my favorite moment was when Eric Gray saw me coming and immediately poured a Pilsner Urquell.

The following was published last year as "I'd stop drinking, but I'm no quitter (the 2019 Gravity Head remix)." It's a stream-of-consciousness collage, and I'll buff and polish a wee bit for 2020.

One part will be retained, but with this explanation: While I've resolved to cease attending meetings apart from cases of extreme emergency, if compelled, only martinis might possibly serve as preparation. 

---

Before the drinking starts, let’s consider a ship leaving the dock and making for open water. We experienced this first-hand in 2016 aboard a big Baltic ferry, leaving Tallinn for Helsinki in the morning and returning at dusk the same day.

In darkness of night the specific sensation might be described as lights fading, but by daylight it is the gradual disappearance of land as the ship moves away from shore. Depending on the weather and the strength of one’s eyesight, there comes a split second when land no longer is visible. It’s a melancholy feeling, like the place itself has ceased to exist apart from a lingering imagination of it.

From this point forward, until the next port of call begins slowly to materialize past the bow, the journey becomes synonymous with the undulating rhythm of the sea.

Similarly, most aspects of business ownership consuming my daily existence for a quarter-century -- the good, the bad, the drunk and the sublime -- have dissolved entirely into those distant invisible headlands. Now it’s just the rocking of the waves, and pondering what it all meant.

These days it seems like another person's life.

---

Col. Sherman T. Potter: I gather you drink.
Captain“Hawkeye” Pierce: Only to excess.

In the Western cultural tradition, there are numerous examples of the seasoned drinker as a sodden protagonist, at times an inspiring and compelling figure -- perhaps even a heroic one, as with Norm Peterson on Cheers -- although bar owner Sam Malone was a reformed alcoholic, as was the real-life Nicholas Colosanto, who played the bartender Coach on the popular show.

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, although it occurs to me some of you might not want to go here, finding this topic distasteful. At the same time, it would be pointless of me to deny or to disavow a career in beverage alcohol, or to suggest that it was only a job.

Trust me; my work wasn't left atop a desk at the office.

I drink very differently now than before, and far less overall, but drinking's still a conscious lifestyle choice. So it goes. I don't drive while intoxicated, and command all drinkers to be responsible.

Back to these fictional drinkers, who in my view reflect an existential aspect of the human condition. To be succinct, what else remains to be said, done or alibied when life’s fundamentally surreal futility strikes you as inescapable, and is best addressed and assuaged by peering through the bottom of a lifted glass, one deftly drained only seconds ago?

The cultural milieu of alcoholic beverages in places like India, Bolivia or Ghana remains a mystery to me, although it is clear that the pursuit of intoxicants is a universal human condition throughout the world. Certain European and American archetypes endure to entertain and enlighten, from Falstaff in olden times to Bukowski in ours, as buttressed by diverse personalities such as W.C. Fields, Dean Martin and Dudley Moore’s Arthur.

I've always been a reader of books. In the American literary oeuvre, one must push past cautionary tales of prohibitionist finger-wagging during the lamentably fevered Carrie Nation period of our national existence, straight to the dawn of the modern period occurring just after the Great War. Inhibitions fell prey to an all-encompassing, collective thirst enabled by the villainous Volstead Act, and brutal realism finally forced its way out of societal straitjackets.

Imbibing in print became great again.

It may have been Ernest Hemingway who first incorporated the drinker’s lifestyle as integral backdrop, seen most strikingly in his groundbreaking novel, The Sun Also Rises. Youthful, disaffected, expatriated Americans find solace in adult beverages at all hours of the day, even when they should be diligently working to appease the Puritanical prerequisites of capitalism and families back home.

The acerbic commentator Dorothy Parker emerged from this period, Scotch in hand. Equilibrium came with Repeal, and America scarcely skipped a beat, quickly eschewing Scott and Zelda for Reefer Madness and later, Timothy Leary. However, this is beyond the scope of today's examination.

Malcolm Lowry was an Englishman heavily influenced by the New World, and he captured the bibulous essence in the person of Geoffrey Firmin, otherwise known as the Consul, in Under the Volcano. Firmin is a defeated man on the Day of the Dead, utterly adrift during his final hours on earth, navigating the streets of a dusty Mexican provincial town in search of celestial meaning and settling instead for bottles of mezcal hidden in the shrubbery, as well as an infamous midday jolt of aftershave.

When seeking literary inspiration across the pond, a personal favorite is J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, chronicling the antics of supposed student Sebastian Dangerfield, a profligate American carousing, drinking, roaring and whoring in Ireland. For more of the same, Anglo-style, consult Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and know that in his prime, the very real Amis fully imitated his art.

On the continent, Czech playwright-turned-statesman Vaclav Havel’s two-person play, Audience, posits an artistic, city-dwelling enemy of the totalitarian state abruptly sent as punishment to the hinterlands and a term as manual laborer in a brewery. He must endure the ramblings of his boss, who cannot refrain from sampling the fermented wares and hilariously sinks into inebriation while haplessly pretending to interrogate the urban exile.

The doctor in László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango desperately tries to ration his enabling pálinka (and fails) as he observes the disintegration of the dysfunctional collective farm, and in the first-person narrative of The Drinker, by Hans Fallada, the hapless Herr Sommer will swallow just about anything as he abruptly transitions from sobriety to alcoholism, and eventually to insanity -- but schnapps is the preferred lubricant of his alarmingly precipitous decline.

For something approximating a philosophical rationale for the drinker’s lifestyle choice, we must turn to Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities and the bombastic figure of Mr. Traba, a retired Lutheran pastor in heavily Catholic (and Communist) Poland.

Mr. Traba’s daily doses of vodka are the pretext for a fateful decision. It is 1963, and he has decided to erase his life’s numerous frustrations by committing a final, exclamatory act: Assassinating Comrade Gomulka, the unimaginative and degraded Communist tyrant. As the tragicomic final moment draws near, the perpetually intoxicated Mr. Traba addresses his companions:

Of course, there were moments in my wasted life when I got the audacious idea in my head to gain mastery of some earthly skill other than drinking, but upon reflection I rejected all these ideas. I drank all my life, and drinking was my work and my rest, my love and my hobby. Drinking was my art, my concert, and my artfully written sonnet. Drinking was my cognition, my description, my synthesis, and my analysis.

Only amateurs, laymen and graphomaniacs assert that you drink in order to soften the monstrosity of the world and to dull unbearable sensitivity. On the contrary, you drink in order to deepen pain and to heighten sensitivity. Especially in a case like mine: when there is nothing but drinking, it is necessary to make an art of drinking, it is necessary to reach the heart of the matter through drinking, and the heart of the matter is death.

When I first read the testimony of Pilch’s extraordinary character, I finally understood the contemporary reality of which all New Albanians boasting consciousness and a pulse must eventually grapple.

Even today, it is virtually impossible to attend a public meeting in this town without recourse to strong drink.

---

Meanwhile, an ancestral imperative creeps into the narrative.

When Gravity Head launches at NABC's Pizzeria & Public House, as it will again on Friday, February 28, the familiar space and time continuum is briefly altered. Normal routines appear Byzantine by comparison. Life’s infinite horizons narrow. One reverts to existence by the hour, or minute by minute. Passing through the looking glass is perfectly boring by comparison.

As for the fest’s actual commencement, once the opening bell sounds there is a collective observance of Dr. Sidney Freedman’s immortal dictum:

“Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice - pull down your pants and slide on the ice.”

Why do I continue to mention Gravity Head even after my final, much belated exit in 2018 from the company I helped found?

It's simple, because once upon a time Gravity Head was my idea. The 2020 edition will be the 22nd such gathering, and I'm unrepentantly proud of my creation. Of course Gravity Head no longer is about me, assuming it ever really was. It always took the entire workplace village to pull it off, and I imagine this remains true.

Besides, gravity’s the law. It’s bigger than you and me.

Gravity Head’s opening day has become somewhat of a chaotic scrum, and a singular tradition all its own. Folks seem content with the interior logic occurring at the fest’s beginning, but this isn’t what every celebrant looks forward to experiencing each year.

Rather, there’ll inevitably be a quiet Tuesday night on the second or third week, with a handful of friends, and leisurely, contemplative sipping of one or two quality libations, spiced with conversation. These are the precious moments that lead to feelings of timelessness.

And without timelessness, beer is far less interesting to me. Will I attend this year? Not sure, and it doesn't matter. Have fun if you do, and be responsible.

---

These days I'm working in the beer trade at Pints&union in downtown New Albany. It's been 14 years since our presumed civic revitalization began with the establishment of Bistro New Albany -- a pivotal if short-lived eatery and watering hole. It operated where Brooklyn & The Butcher is located today.

Amid the prevailing Gahanian personality cult of the present, the pendulum has swung all the way back to alcohol as the best available means to deepen pain and heighten sensitivity. Dissipation may be a masochistic coping mechanism to counter the Disney-fried dictatorship, but it has the benefit of reminding us of how little the base culture of obliviousness has changed in all this time.

My favorite way of defining dissipation is this: “Unrestrained indulgence in physical pleasures, especially alcohol.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been an aficionado of dissipation, albeit in the manner of a willful, controlled narrative. In the hands of lesser mortals, dissipation can be harmful, but there are times when it proceeds from conscious calculation in the face of savage, visceral, conditioned responses, as when a glance at the calendar confirms that it’s a first Monday or third Thursday, and the occasion for another New Albany common council meeting.

(Given that attendance at fix-forever-in Redevelopment Commission meetings would require sedation by an anesthesiologist, let’s not even go there ... literally as well as figuratively.)

Considering the implications of meeting attendance, you find yourself thinking about how those impossibly brief final hours should be spent before history rudely repeats itself as tragedy, farce or vaudeville’s worst ventriloquist routines. Will you smoke a cigarette, have a last supper, and leave a testament for posterity?

Better to have a stiff drink, relax and enjoy the inevitable. Dissipation suddenly ceases to be a pejorative term thrown your way by the kill-joys and health fascists, and comes to more closely resemble what Hemingway, a true giant of the dissipative genre, once described as a “means of sovereign action.”

Papa was talking about a bottle of liquor, which could be consumed, used to crack skulls or rendered into a Molotov cocktail, sometimes all at once. Until recently, I stuck to a regimen of Progressive Pints somewhere downtown before ambling down to the City-County Building and taking in the floor show.

But times change, and medicine's effectiveness changes with them. Lately the prescription has come full circle, all the way back to the improvised still in the Swamp at the 4077th.

It may or may not have been gin, but there can be no doubt that it was the right stuff.

Hawkeye Pierce: Let’s make a pact about drinking.
Trapper John McIntyre: All right.
Hawkeye Pierce: Let’s never stop.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Hard seltzer? Whatever happened to wine coolers, anyway? Can't it just be beer-thirty every day?

I can't bring myself to post an image of a "hard seltzer," and so here's a delicious boot of  Weihenstephaner Festbier.

One important thing to remember when pondering hundreds of types of jacked-up liquids designed primarily to mask the flavor of the alcohol is the source of the alcohol itself.

The use of liquor and/or wine would come at a higher rate of taxation; however, ferment some cane sugar and the finished ingredient is taxed like beer, at a lower rate. This matters a lot to a bazillion-dollar market.

Meanwhile the first known use of "alcopop" came in 1996.

The case against hard seltzer, by Bo Franklin (1843 Magazine)

Alcopops of old were brash, offering puckering sweetness and vibrant hues that made them a clear indulgence. This unabashed sense of fun was their downfall: they enticed young people and were very obviously not good for them. Hard seltzer, by contrast, is an apology of a drink. By essentially spiking La Croix, the upmarket sparkling water that aspirational twenty-somethings obsess over, the makers of hard seltzer have cynically exploited the “wellness” trend, positioning their drinks as a salubrious way to get steaming drunk on a sunny afternoon. The result? Every insipid swig reminds you of its apparent worthiness; it’s a fairly efficient way to get drunk but offers little pleasure. Hard seltzer is booze masquerading as something far more dull: water.

But maybe The Economist's writer is missing something. A few weeks back at Pints&union we started stocking the two top-selling White Claw flavors, mango and black cherry. Afterward my attention was drawn to this informative angle.

The key to White Claw’s surging popularity: Marketing to a post-gender world, by Emily Heil (Washington Post)

“You could see White Claw as the dawning of this post-gender world where millennials and Gen Z are comfortable with the idea of gender fluidity” ...

... White Claw’s ads and social media posts feature the canned product — slimmer and taller than a traditional beer can — front and center, with men and women firmly in the backdrop. And when they do appear, they’re on equal footing.

There’s football — not on a bar TV but rather a co-ed game being played outdoors. Women might be shown in tightfitting clothes, but it’s athletic gear or just regular beachwear, and the models look strong and fit instead of seductive.

That’s entirely intentional, says Sanjiv Gajiwala, vice president of marketing for White Claw. When the brand launched in 2016, the idea behind it was that the traditional worlds depicted in beverage marketing had pretty much gone extinct. White Claw would be the drink of the new gender norms, of the kinds of “group hangs” that define young people’s social lives. “It wasn’t a world where guys got together in a basement and drank beer and women were off doing something else, drinking with their girlfriends,” Gajiwala said. “Whatever we put out creatively and how we positioned the brand really reflects that everyone hangs out together all the time.”

Interesting.

We were advised by the wholesaler from the outset that obtaining reliable stocks of these flavors in the signature "slimmer and taller than a traditional beer can" White Claw unit might be impossible given an ongoing shortage of these cans, or aluminum tariffs, or maybe both.

Consequently we opted for the very same liquid in traditional 16-oz "tall boy" cans.

Now, my being the sort who cares about the actual flavor of the beverage alcohol variant I'm choosing to swallow, the shape of the package would seem to be of little consequence, but perhaps the relative slowness of White Claw's sales pace at the pub thus far has to do with the comparatively less popular shape of the can.

I can't help thinking back to previous alcoholic beverage "innovations," from wine coolers to Zima.

Will "hard seltzer" have the sort of legs they didn't? Analysts seem to think so. As for me, I must echo the words of the immortal Pal Paulsen and concede that our little chat about hard seltzer moves me -- straight to the fridge for another Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. 

"The rise of the teetotal student," and what Mencken might say about it.

H.L. Mencken once commented on teetotalism.

Teetotalism does not make for human happiness; it makes for the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard. The men who do things in the world, the men worthy of admiration and imitation, are men constitutionally incapable of any such pecksniffian stupidity. Their ideal is not a safe life, but a full life; they do not try to follow the canary bird in a cage, but the eagle in the air. And in particular they do not flee from shadows and bugaboos. The alcohol myth is such a bugaboo. The sort of man it scares is the sort of man whose chief mark is that he is scared all the time.

H.L. Mencken, "Alcohol", Damn! A Book of Calumny, 1918

Concurrently there's nothing surprising about the rise of the teetotal student, and I've no criticism to make of it. Abstinence absent compulsion (for the rest of us to do the same) is just fine, and those who choose to drink should so so responsibly. Cohabitation is good.

Period.

'I'm not spending money on that': the rise of the teetotal student, by Suzanne Bearne (The Guardian)

Universities are seeing an increase in teetotal clubs and alcohol-free accommodation. Why are students drinking less?

... A rising number of young people are abstaining from booze, with 36% of 16-24 year-olds in full-time eduction not touching alcohol, according to a survey by University College London. Dr Linda Ng Fat, lead author of the study, believes that an overall decline in drinking has made it more acceptable for young people to shun alcohol. “It seems that non-drinking is becoming more normative, which could make it easier for more and more young people not to drink, should they choose to.”

ON THE AVENUES: I'd stop drinking, but I'm no quitter (the 2019 Gravity Head remix).

ON THE AVENUES: I'd stop drinking, but I'm no quitter (the 2019 Gravity Head remix).

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

---

Today's column artfully combines excerpts from previous ramblings.

---

Before the drinking starts, let’s consider a ship leaving the dock and making for open water. We experienced this first-hand in 2016 aboard a big Baltic ferry, leaving Tallinn for Helsinki in the morning and returning at dusk the same day.

In darkness of night the specific sensation might be described as lights fading, but by daylight it is the gradual disappearance of land as the ship moves away from shore. Depending on the weather and the strength of one’s eyesight, there comes a split second when land no longer is visible. It’s a melancholy feeling, like the place itself has ceased to exist apart from a lingering imagination of it.

From this point forward, until the next port of call begins slowly to materialize past the bow, the journey becomes synonymous with the undulating rhythm of the sea.

Similarly, most aspects of business ownership consuming my daily existence for a quarter-century -- the good, the bad, the drunk and the sublime -- have dissolved entirely into those distant invisible headlands. Now it’s just the rocking of the waves, and pondering what it all meant.

These days it seems like another person's life.

---

Col. Sherman T. Potter: I gather you drink.
Captain“Hawkeye” Pierce: Only to excess.

In the Western cultural tradition, there are numerous examples of the seasoned drinker as a sodden protagonist, at times an inspiring and compelling figure -- perhaps even a heroic one, as with Norm Peterson on Cheers -- although bar owner Sam Malone was a reformed alcoholic, as was the real-life Nicholas Colosanto, who played the bartender Coach on the popular show.

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, although it occurs to me some of you might not want to go here, finding this topic distasteful. At the same time, it would be pointless of me to deny or to disavow a career in beverage alcohol, or to suggest that it was only a job.

Trust me; my work wasn't left atop a desk at the office.

I drink very differently now than before, and far less overall, but drinking's still a conscious lifestyle choice. So it goes. I don't drive while intoxicated, and command all drinkers to be responsible.

Back to these fictional drinkers, who in my view reflect an existential aspect of the human condition. To be succinct, what else remains to be said, done or alibied when life’s fundamentally surreal futility strikes you as inescapable, and is best addressed and assuaged by peering through the bottom of a lifted glass, one deftly drained only seconds ago?

The cultural milieu of alcoholic beverages in places like India, Bolivia or Ghana remains a mystery to me, although it is clear that the pursuit of intoxicants is a universal human condition throughout the world. Certain European and American archetypes endure to entertain and enlighten, from Falstaff in olden times to Bukowski in ours, as buttressed by diverse personalities such as W.C. Fields, Dean Martin and Dudley Moore’s Arthur.

I've always been a reader of books. In the American literary oeuvre, one must push past cautionary tales of prohibitionist finger-wagging during the lamentably fevered Carrie Nation period of our national existence, straight to the dawn of the modern period occurring just after the Great War. Inhibitions fell prey to an all-encompassing, collective thirst enabled by the villainous Volstead Act, and brutal realism finally forced its way out of societal straitjackets.

Imbibing in print became great again.

It may have been Ernest Hemingway who first incorporated the drinker’s lifestyle as integral backdrop, seen most strikingly in his groundbreaking novel, The Sun Also Rises. Youthful, disaffected, expatriated Americans find solace in adult beverages at all hours of the day, even when they should be diligently working to appease the Puritanical prerequisites of capitalism and families back home.

The acerbic commentator Dorothy Parker emerged from this period, Scotch in hand. Equilibrium came with Repeal, and America scarcely skipped a beat, quickly eschewing Scott and Zelda for Reefer Madness and later, Timothy Leary. However, this is beyond the scope of today's examination.

Malcolm Lowry was an Englishman heavily influenced by the New World, and he captured the bibulous essence in the person of Geoffrey Firmin, otherwise known as the Consul, in Under the Volcano. Firmin is a defeated man on the Day of the Dead, utterly adrift during his final hours on earth, navigating the streets of a dusty Mexican provincial town in search of celestial meaning and settling instead for bottles of mezcal hidden in the shrubbery, as well as an infamous midday jolt of aftershave.

When seeking literary inspiration across the pond, a personal favorite is J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, chronicling the antics of supposed student Sebastian Dangerfield, a profligate American carousing, drinking, roaring and whoring in Ireland. For more of the same, Anglo-style, consult Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and know that in his prime, the very real Amis fully imitated his art.

On the continent, Czech playwright-turned-statesman Vaclav Havel’s two-person play, Audience, posits an artistic, city-dwelling enemy of the totalitarian state abruptly sent as punishment to the hinterlands and a term as manual laborer in a brewery. He must endure the ramblings of his boss, who cannot refrain from sampling the fermented wares and hilariously sinks into inebriation while haplessly pretending to interrogate the urban exile.

The doctor in László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango desperately tries to ration his enabling pálinka (and fails) as he observes the disintegration of the dysfunctional collective farm, and in the first-person narrative of The Drinker, by Hans Fallada, the hapless Herr Sommer will swallow just about anything as he abruptly transitions from sobriety to alcoholism, and eventually to insanity -- but schnapps is the preferred lubricant of his alarmingly precipitous decline.

For something approximating a philosophical rationale for the drinker’s lifestyle choice, we must turn to Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities and the bombastic figure of Mr. Traba, a retired Lutheran pastor in heavily Catholic (and Communist) Poland.

Mr. Traba’s daily doses of vodka are the pretext for a fateful decision. It is 1963, and he has decided to erase his life’s numerous frustrations by committing a final, exclamatory act: Assassinating Comrade Gomulka, the unimaginative and degraded Communist tyrant. As the tragicomic final moment draws near, the perpetually intoxicated Mr. Traba addresses his companions:

Of course, there were moments in my wasted life when I got the audacious idea in my head to gain mastery of some earthly skill other than drinking, but upon reflection I rejected all these ideas. I drank all my life, and drinking was my work and my rest, my love and my hobby. Drinking was my art, my concert, and my artfully written sonnet. Drinking was my cognition, my description, my synthesis, and my analysis.

Only amateurs, laymen and graphomaniacs assert that you drink in order to soften the monstrosity of the world and to dull unbearable sensitivity. On the contrary, you drink in order to deepen pain and to heighten sensitivity. Especially in a case like mine: when there is nothing but drinking, it is necessary to make an art of drinking, it is necessary to reach the heart of the matter through drinking, and the heart of the matter is death.

When I first read the testimony of Pilch’s extraordinary character, I finally understood the contemporary reality of which all New Albanians boasting consciousness and a pulse must eventually grapple.

Even today, it is virtually impossible to attend a public meeting in this town without recourse to strong drink.

---

Meanwhile, an ancestral imperative creeps into the narrative.

When Gravity Head launches at NABC's Pizzeria & Public House, as it will again this Friday, February 22, the familiar space and time continuum is briefly altered. Normal routines appear Byzantine by comparison. Life’s infinite horizons narrow. One reverts to existence by the hour, or minute by minute. Passing through the looking glass is perfectly boring by comparison.

As for the fest’s actual commencement, once the opening bell sounds there is a collective observance of Dr. Sidney Freedman’s immortal dictum:

“Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice - pull down your pants and slide on the ice.”

Why do I continue to mention Gravity Head even after my final, much belated exit in 2018 from the company I helped found?

It's simple, because once upon a time Gravity Head was my idea. The 2019 edition will be the 21st such gathering, and I'm proud of my creation. Of course Gravity Head no longer is about me, assuming it ever really was. It always took the entire workplace village to pull it off, and I imagine this remains true.

Besides, gravity’s the law. It’s bigger than you and me.

Gravity Head’s opening day has become somewhat of a chaotic scrum, and a singular tradition all its own. Folks seem content with the interior logic occurring at the fest’s beginning, but this isn’t what every celebrant looks forward to experiencing each year.

Rather, there’ll inevitably be a quiet Tuesday night on the second or third week, with a handful of friends, and leisurely, contemplative sipping of one or two quality libations, spiced with conversation. These are the precious moments that lead to feelings of timelessness.

And without timelessness, beer is far less interesting to me. Will I attend this year? Not sure, and it doesn't matter. Have fun if you do, and be responsible.

---

These days I'm working in the beer trade at Pints&union in downtown New Albany. It's been 13 years since our presumed civic revitalization began with the establishment of Bistro New Albany -- a pivotal if short-lived eatery and watering hole. It operated where Brooklyn & The Butcher is located today.

Amid the prevailing Gahanian personality cult of the present, the pendulum has swung all the way back to alcohol as the best available means to deepen pain and heighten sensitivity. Dissipation may be a masochistic coping mechanism to counter the Disney-fried dictatorship, but it has the benefit of reminding us of how little the base culture of obliviousness has changed in all this time.

My favorite way of defining dissipation is this: “Unrestrained indulgence in physical pleasures, especially alcohol.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been an aficionado of dissipation, albeit in the manner of a willful, controlled narrative. In the hands of lesser mortals, dissipation can be harmful, but there are times when it proceeds from conscious calculation in the face of savage, visceral, conditioned responses, as when a glance at the calendar confirms that it’s a first Monday or third Thursday, and the occasion for another New Albany common council meeting.

(Given that attendance at fix-forever-in Redevelopment Commission meetings would require sedation by an anesthesiologist, let’s not even go there ... literally as well as figuratively.)

Considering the implications of meeting attendance, you find yourself thinking about how those impossibly brief final hours should be spent before history rudely repeats itself as tragedy, farce or vaudeville’s worst ventriloquist routines. Will you smoke a cigarette, have a last supper, and leave a testament for posterity?

Better to have a stiff drink, relax and enjoy the inevitable. Dissipation suddenly ceases to be a pejorative term thrown your way by the kill-joys and health fascists, and comes to more closely resemble what Hemingway, a true giant of the dissipative genre, once described as a “means of sovereign action.”

Papa was talking about a bottle of liquor, which could be consumed, used to crack skulls or rendered into a Molotov cocktail, sometimes all at once. Until recently, I stuck to a regimen of Progressive Pints somewhere downtown before ambling down to the City-County Building and taking in the floor show.

But times change, and medicine's effectiveness changes with them. Lately the prescription has come full circle, all the way back to the improvised still in the Swamp at the 4077th.

It may or may not have been gin, but there can be no doubt that it was the right stuff.

Hawkeye Pierce: Let’s make a pact about drinking.
Trapper John McIntyre: All right.
Hawkeye Pierce: Let’s never stop.

---

Recent columns:

February 12: ON THE AVENUES: If it's about learning and knowledge, then by definition it's a Gahan Free Zone. You're welcome.

February 5: ON THE AVENUES: Our mayor hates non-elected boards -- except when they're his own, which is why "hypocrisy" is spelled G-A-H-A-N.

January 29: ON THE AVENUES: How has the 3rd district councilman fared since this question from 2015: "Et tu, Greg Phipps?"

January 22: ON THE AVENUES: Democrats should judge city council incumbents in districts 2, 3, 4 and 5 by their regressive deeds, not their progressive words.

Dear antifa: Can you include these teetotaling medical researchers in your next action?

Origins of the word (teetotalism) are interesting, indeed, but in this time of health fascists and killjoys, we turn to a fellow who understands the concept of "risk."

David Spiegelhalter, Winton professor for the public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge, said the data showed only a very low level of harm in moderate drinkers and suggested UK guidelines were very low risk.

“Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no ‘safe’ level does not seem an argument for abstention,” he said. “There is no safe level of driving, but government do not recommend that people avoid driving. Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.”

Tell you what: you folks abstain, and then there'll be more of the good hootch left for me.

And by the way, to the health fascists: go forth, eat shit and ... that's right, die.

No healthy level of alcohol consumption, says major study, by Sarah Boseley (The Guardian)

Governments should consider advising people to abstain entirely, say authors

Even the occasional drink is harmful to health, according to the largest and most detailed research carried out on the effects of alcohol, which suggests governments should think of advising people to abstain completely.

The uncompromising message comes from the authors of the Global Burden of Diseases study, a rolling project based at the University of Washington, in Seattle, which produces the most comprehensive data on the causes of illness and death in the world.

Beer and coffee: "Write drunk, edit sober" — Ernest Hemingway.

Photo credit.

It's an old article, but a timeless one; thanks to J for the link. This is why pubs should have espresso machines.

"Beer for the idea, coffee for the execution" could be the title of my autobiography, although Biscuit's famous "What I Remember" still applies.

Drink Beer for Big Ideas, Coffee to Get Them Done, by Mikael Cho (Lifehacker)

A Creative Prescription: The Optimal Way to Drink Coffee and Beer

Both coffee and beer (in moderation) have shown to be helpful when you’re working on certain types of tasks; however, you shouldn’t drink either when you need to do detail-oriented or analytical projects like your finances. The increase in adrenaline from caffeine and the inhibition of your working memory from alcohol will make you more prone to make mistakes.

Beer For the Idea

The best time to have a beer (or two) would be when you’re searching for an initial idea. Because alcohol helps decrease your working memory (making you feel relaxed and less worried about what’s going on around you), you’ll have more brain power dedicated to making deeper connections.

Neuroscientists have studied the “eureka moment” and found that in order to produce moments of insight, you need to feel relaxed so that front brain thinking (obvious connections) can move to the back of the brain (where unique, lateral connections are made) and activate the anterior superior temporal gyrus, a small spot above your right ear responsible for moments of insight:

Researchers found that about five seconds before you have a "eureka moment" there is a large increase in alpha waves that activates the anterior superior temporal gyrus. These alpha waves are associated with relaxation—which explains why you often get ideas while you’re on a walk, in the shower, or on the toilet.

Alcohol is a substance that relaxes you, so it produces a similar effect on alpha waves and helping us reach creative insights. Coffee doesn’t necessarily help you access more creative parts of your brain like a couple pints of beer.

Coffee For the Execution

If you’ve already got an idea or an outline of where you want to go with your project, a cup of coffee would do wonders compared to having a beer to execute on your idea. The general consensus across caffeine studies is that it can increase quality and performance if the task you are doing seems easy and doesn’t require too much abstract thinking. In other words, after you have an initial idea or a plan laid out, a cup of coffee can help you execute and follow through on your concept faster without compromising quality.

ON THE AVENUES: I'd stop drinking, but I'm no quitter.

ON THE AVENUES: I'd stop drinking, but I'm no quitter. 



A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.


Col. Sherman T. Potter: I gather you drink.
Captain“Hawkeye” Pierce: Only to excess.

In the Western cultural tradition, there are numerous examples of the seasoned drinker as a sodden protagonist, at times an inspiring and compelling figure – perhaps even a heroic one, as with Norm Peterson on Cheers – although bar owner Sam Malone was a reformed alcoholic, as was the real-life Nicholas Colosanto, who played the bartender Coach on the popular show.

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, although it occurs to me some of you might not want to go here, finding the topic distasteful. At the same time, it would be pointless of me to deny or to disavow a career in beverage alcohol, or to suggest that it was only a job. Trust me; my work wasn't left back atop a desk at the office.

I drink very differently now than before, and far less overall, but drinking's still a conscious lifestyle choice. So it goes.

Back to these fictional drinkers, who in my view reflect an existential aspect of the human condition. To be succinct, what else remains to be said, done or alibied when life’s fundamentally surreal futility strikes you as inescapable, and is best addressed and assuaged by peering through the bottom of a lifted glass, one deftly drained just seconds ago?

The cultural milieu of alcoholic beverages in places like India, Bolivia or Ghana remains a mystery to me, although it is clear that the pursuit of intoxicants is a universal human condition throughout the world. Certain European and American archetypes endure to entertain and enlighten, from Falstaff in olden times to Bukowski in ours, as buttressed by diverse personalities such as W.C. Fields, Dean Martin and Dudley Moore’s Arthur.

Much to the consternation of Trumpolini's dull cadres, I've always been a reader of books. In the American literary oeuvre, one must push past cautionary tales of prohibitionist finger-wagging during the lamentably fevered Carrie Nation period of our national existence, straight to the dawn of the modern period occurring just after the Great War. Inhibitions fell prey to an all-encompassing, collective thirst enabled by the villainous Volstead Act, and brutal realism finally forced its way out of societal straitjackets.

Imbibing in print became great again.

It may have been Ernest Hemingway who first incorporated the drinker’s lifestyle as integral backdrop, seen most strikingly in his groundbreaking novel, The Sun Also Rises. Youthful, disaffected, expatriated Americans find solace in adult beverages at all hours of the day, even when they should be diligently working to appease the Puritanical prerequisites of capitalism and families back home.

Equilibrium came with Repeal, and America scarcely skipped a beat, quickly eschewing Scott and Zelda for Reefer Madness and later, Timothy Leary. However, this is beyond the scope of today's column.

---

Malcolm Lowry was an Englishman heavily influenced by the New World, and he captured the bibulous essence in the person of Geoffrey Firmin, otherwise known as the Consul, in Under the Volcano. Firmin is a defeated man on the Day of the Dead, utterly adrift during his final hours on earth, navigating the streets of a dusty Mexican provincial town in search of celestial meaning and settling instead for bottles of mezcal hidden in the shrubbery, as well as an infamous midday jolt of aftershave.

When seeking literary inspiration across the pond, a personal favorite is J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, chronicling the antics of supposed student Sebastian Dangerfield, a profligate American carousing, drinking, roaring and whoring in Ireland. For more of the same, Anglo-style, consult Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and know that in his prime, the very real Amis fully imitated his art.

On the continent, Czech playwright-turned-statesman Vaclav Havel’s two-person play, Audience, posits an artistic, city-dwelling enemy of the totalitarian state abruptly sent as punishment to the hinterlands and a term as manual laborer in a brewery. He must endure the ramblings of his boss, who cannot refrain from sampling the fermented wares and hilariously sinks into inebriation while haplessly pretending to interrogate the urban exile.

The doctor in László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango desperately tries to ration his enabling pálinka (and fails) as he observes the disintegration of the dysfunctional collective farm, and in the first-person narrative of The Drinker, by Hans Fallada, the hapless Herr Sommer will swallow just about anything as he abruptly transitions from sobriety to alcoholism, and eventually to insanity – but schnapps is the preferred lubricant of his alarmingly precipitous decline.

For something approximating a philosophical rationale for the drinker’s lifestyle choice, we must turn to Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities and the bombastic figure of Mr. Traba, a retired Lutheran pastor in heavily Catholic (and Communist) Poland.

Mr. Traba’s daily doses of vodka are the pretext for a fateful decision. It is 1963, and he has decided to erase his life’s numerous frustrations by committing a final, exclamatory act: Assassinating Gomulka, the unimaginative and degraded Communist tyrant. As the tragicomic final moment draws near, the perpetually intoxicated Mr. Traba addresses his companions:

Of course, there were moments in my wasted life when I got the audacious idea in my head to gain mastery of some earthly skill other than drinking, but upon reflection I rejected all these ideas. I drank all my life, and drinking was my work and my rest, my love and my hobby. Drinking was my art, my concert, and my artfully written sonnet. Drinking was my cognition, my description, my synthesis, and my analysis.

Only amateurs, laymen and graphomaniacs assert that you drink in order to soften the monstrosity of the world and to dull unbearable sensitivity. On the contrary, you drink in order to deepen pain and to heighten sensitivity. Especially in a case like mine: when there is nothing but drinking, it is necessary to make an art of drinking, it is necessary to reach the heart of the matter through drinking, and the heart of the matter is death.

When I first read the testimony of Pilch’s extraordinary character, I finally understood the contemporary reality of which all New Albanians boasting consciousness and a pulse must eventually grapple.

Even today, it is virtually impossible to attend a public meeting in this town without recourse to strong drink.

---

In fact, a full decade after our presumed civic revitalization began with the establishment of Bistro New Albany -- a pivotal if short-lived eatery and watering hole -- the pendulum has swung all the way back to alcohol as the best available means to deepen pain and heighten sensitivity. Dissipation may be a masochistic coping mechanism to counter the Disney-fried dictatorship, but it has the benefit of reminding us of how little the base culture has changed in all this time.

My favorite way of defining dissipation is this: “Unrestrained indulgence in physical pleasures, especially alcohol.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been an aficionado of dissipation, albeit in the manner of a willful, controlled narrative. In the hands of lesser mortals, dissipation can be harmful, but there are times when it proceeds from conscious calculation in the face of savage, visceral, conditioned responses, as when a glance at the calendar confirms that it’s a first Monday or third Thursday, and the occasion for another New Albany common council meeting.

(Given that attendance at Redevelopment Commission meetings would require sedation by an anesthesiologist, let’s not even go there ... literally as well as figuratively.)

Considering the implications of meeting attendance, you find yourself thinking about how those impossibly brief final hours should be spent before history rudely repeats itself as tragedy, farce or vaudeville’s worst ventriloquist routines. Will you smoke a cigarette, have a last supper, and leave a testament for posterity?

Better to have a stiff drink, relax and enjoy the inevitable. Dissipation suddenly ceases to be a pejorative term thrown your way by the kill-joys and health fascists, and comes to more closely resemble what Ernest Hemingway, a true giant of the dissipative genre, once described as a “means of sovereign action.”

Papa was talking about a bottle of liquor, which could be consumed, used to crack skulls or rendered into a Molotov cocktail, sometimes all at once. Until recently, I stuck to a regimen of Progressive Pints somewhere downtown before ambling down to the City-County Building and taking in the floor show.

But times change, and medicine's effectiveness changes with them. Lately the prescription has come full circle, all the way back to the improvised still in the Swamp. It may or may not have been gin, but there can be no doubt that it was the right stuff.

Hawkeye Pierce: Let’s make a pact about drinking.
Trapper John McIntyre: All right.
Hawkeye Pierce: Let’s never stop.

---

Recent columns:

February 2: ON THE AVENUES: A luxury-obsessed Jeff Gahan has packed a board and now seeks to break the New Albany Housing Authority. Can we impeach him yet?

January 26: ON THE AVENUES: Jeff Gahan and Adam Dickey are Trumping the Donald when it comes to breathtaking moral turpitude. Have they no shame?

January 19: ON THE AVENUES: Mezcal for what ails you.

January 12: ON THE AVENUES: I can only handle one resistance at a time, please.

January 5: ON THE AVENUES: Gahan's stadium arcadium kicks off a new year with hilarity, pathos and own goals.

When Bob Caesar's numb council patter is the problem, the iFlask is your cherished antidote.

This might be the best idea ever: The iFlask.

iFlask is the world's first ever "smart" flask. At a glance It looks just like any modern day smartphone, but the iFlask does something no smartphone can do. Hold generous amounts of your favorite beverages!

Thanks, B.

Coomes on waterside drinking.

There is an "eye of the beholder" aspect to all this, which probably makes sense. What doesn't make sense are the layers upon layers of alcohol regulation -- local, state, federal -- as reflect "thinking" that hasn't changed since Prohibition was repealed.

Booze blues: Liquor-shy Metro Council unwisely delays Waterfront tavern vote, by Steve Coomes (Insider Louisville)

It appears the Louisville Metro Council needs to get out more, as in across the Ohio River, to see what’s happening along the waterfront in New Albany, Jeffersonville and Clarksville. There are restaurants and bars popping up all the time along or near those shores, drawing hoards to the edge of the region’s most significant geographical feature while enjoying food and adult beverages.

Yes, beer, wine and spirits, because they can and have a right to, even if they’re not consumed with food.

Sobriety -- now there's your social awkwardness.

I needed a drink just to read this piece of health fascist propaganda below).

After all, it's after 12  ... okay, it's almost noon.

Yesterday it was time to purchase a replacement bottle of gin, so after loading in for Rock the Rocks, I steered the car toward Pearl Street and the oasis known hereabouts as Keg Liquors, only to remember that the street was being blocked off for a car show -- which I take it was an officially-sanctioned white bread Bicentennial event, or else Emperor Caesar would have self-immolated.

I went home instead, but later, me and the missus went on a long walk, and following restorative espresso at Quills, we strolled over to Keg for the necessary larder. It was helpfully brown paper bagged, and we set out for Spring Street and the route home, where we'd be walking in the same direction as cars should be traveling if not for the ceaseless Luddite resistance to human rationality.

Before reaching the turn, we encountered selected city officials. Pleasantries were exchanged, and afterwards, my wife speculated as to whether they think we're alcoholics.

No, I replied. In all likelihood, and speaking only for myself, they KNOW it. But it's just as Winston Churchill once said: "I've gotten more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me."

These are words for living and coping, especially in this benumbed and often quite stupid place, and that's why a small scientific sampling hardly deters me.

Alcohol can make you socially awkward, by Kimberly Gillan (MSN)

You might reach for a schooner or a glass of sparkling to take the edge off an awkward social situation, but a new study shows that too much alcohol renders you incapable of reading social cues.

US researchers recruited 12 college students and gave half of them an alcoholic drink and the other half a non-alcoholic drink.

They were asked to match images of happy, angry, fearful and neutral faces with faces with the same facial expression while their brains were being scanned ...

Dr. Tom drove me to drink. That's the one thing I'm so indebted to him for.

As we await learned Floyd County Health Department instruction as to the proper amount of head for crowning a draft beer, here is a consideration of why writers drink. I've always thought it's because the absence of vice renders life (and art) unacceptably banal -- as in Mitt Romney.

Why do writers drink?, by Blake Morrison (Guardian)

... Does it help writers to drink? Do they drink any more heavily than any other social group – doctors, lawyers, shop assistants or (see Mad Men) advertising executives? A famous drinker himself, (Kingsley) Amis considers this question in his Memoirs, and – comparing writers to actors – suggests "displaced stage fright as a cause of literary alcoholism. A writer's audience is and remains invisible to him, but if he is any good he is acutely and continuously aware of it, and never more so while it waits for him to come on, to begin p.1. Alcohol not only makes you less self-critical, it reduces fear." According to Amis, a large glass can supply "that final burst of energy at the end of the day" but should be avoided any earlier: "The writer who writes his books on, rather than between, whisky is a lousy writer. He is probably American anyway."

Indiana alcohol legislation, teetotaling and "public safety."

Yes, Representative Bill Davis is serious: If small brewers were to sell closed containers of craft beer at farmers markets (as farmhouse wineries already can), public drunkenness and illicit fornication soon would chase the kiddos away from the heirloom tomato stall. I was there in the room when Davis remarked that if he had his way, Prohibition would yet again be the law(less) of the land.

Perhaps soon the legislature of Mississippi will begin its sessions with a new prayer: "Thank God for Indiana, or else we'd be the most ... "

You know, red state shit.

Legislature had little taste for alcohol bills, by Maureen Hayden (CNHI Statehouse Bureau)

Greensburg — When it comes to alcohol, the 2013 legislative session may be marked more by what it didn’t do to boost booze sales than what it did.

Legislators did decide to let a small group of well-established wineries and breweries to get into the business of distilling spirits, and it cleared the way for an auction of some cheap liquor licenses for lakefront development in a resort community on Lake Michigan. But they crafted both bills to have narrow impact.

In turning down another bill that would have given Indiana breweries the same right as Indiana wineries to sell their products at farmers’ markets, the legislative gatekeepers signaled their distaste for lifting Indiana’s historically strict limits on alcohol.

“If we did that, the next thing you’d know, we’d have farmers markets turning into liquor stores,” said House Public Policy Chairman Bill Davis, a Republican from Portland who’s played a key role in killing alcohol expansion bills.

Davis is a teetotaler who’s repeatedly killed a bill that would allow grocery and liquor stores to sell carry-out alcohol on Sundays. But he said decisions aren’t based on his personal views, but on what’s best for the public safety.

"Rich Inner Substance" at io9.

Rob and Karen pointed me to this collection of Soviet anti-alcohol posters at io9, of which there are so many that we might establish a new wing of the Red Room.

The first image at the site ("Life as a sober and an alcoholic man") strikes me as pre-Soviet in character in its depiction of bearded peasants. Perhaps my favorite is the one shown above. It strikes me as an accurate representation of my life as a professional drinker.

Legislative libations 2: Sunday alcohol sales, with a huge question mark attached ...

Chris Sikich of the IndyStar provides an overview of this year's model, i.e., Sunday alcohol sales legislation, and it's one of the best pieces I've read on the topic, given that  "booze on Sunday" in America is a far more predictable harbinger of tribalism than a topic for dispassionate discussion.

Sikich duly notes recent Sunday carry-out exceptions for Indiana's small breweries, and the long-standing exemption for small wineries. I might add that while the Brewers of Indiana Guild has interest in a few bits of legislation possibly being considered in 2013, this isn't one of them. As a guild director, believe me when I say that we have our own side of the street to work -- and we're doing so. This particular issue isn't our fight.
Disclaimers aside, and speaking only personally, part of me is eternally annoyed that "moral" considerations as defined by religious interests should be a part of the Sunday equation at this late date. Another part entirely understands that small independent business surely will suffer if big boxes go into Sunday sales. I'm forever willing to sock it to the preachers and health fascists, but at the same time, giving an inch to mega-retail chain-think is odious to my own inner moral structure.

When I'm declared dictator, it's an easy call: Let the indie package stores open on Sundays if they wish, and keep the chains shut tight. Then again, some might say I'm an extremist.

In the end, Senator Alting probably is right: Change will be incremental, in bits and pieces, because such hesitancy truly reflects a state of division in the state of Indiana.

Need I add: Support your local breweries and wineries. That's the best solution, and it beats the Silver Bullet every damned single time.

Sunday liquor sales battle brewing: An effort is afoot to change Indiana's law, but owners of liquor stores say the move would be devastating, by Chris Sikich (IndyStar)

Indiana is the toughest place in the nation to buy take-home beer or liquor on Sundays.

While most states limit Sunday alcohol sales in some ways, Hoosiers face the broadest restrictions.

Indiana prohibits Sunday sales of beer, wine and liquor at grocery and packaged liquor stores. Connecticut lifted a similar ban in May, leaving Indiana standing alone.

The longtime ban has remained in place for religious and economic reasons. And though it has been eroded somewhat in recent years, state lawmakers trying to do away with the ban this year aren't hopeful.

Riverfront three-ways: Alcoholic beverages vs. square meals?

Earlier today, the discussion turned to legal esoterica, and as I should have known, it wouldn't be simple.

CeeSaw whiffs on a fat pitch as council considers expanding the booze zone.

Having now received a copy of G-06-15 from the city attorney, I may need help from a legal mind (not Legal Bagel, mind you).

I recall at the time of G-06-15's passing in 2006 that council members mentioned "50% food sales" language in the ordinance as making it difficult for those seeking a riverfront area three-way permit to run a booze-only joint (bearing in mind that all permit holders must have foodstuffs available at all times), as opposed to a restaurant dedicated primarily to meals.

Disregarding how convoluted these variations of "bar" and "restaurant" can become, such language is not stated in the ordinance passed by the city council, although reference is made to following the procedures and stipulations included in the state of Indiana's legal playbook:

IC 7.1-3-20-16
Airport restaurants; restaurants in certain economic development areas; redevelopment projects or districts, historic river vessels, cultural centers, historic districts.

However, the only mention I can find of 50% food sales comes under the heading of "service bars" at IC 7.1-3-20-17, which does not seem to apply to the topic at hand.

And yet I trust my memory, and recall council members assuring themselves that the legal language therein would preclude evil dive bars from brandishing cheap three-ways. I'm throwing this out for discussion and clarification, because I'll be tied up with work most of the day:

Exactly what, if anything, exists to prevent a special riverfront three-way permit holder from operating a gin mill, wherein the bare minimum foodstuffs required by the state (and seldom witnessed by customers) are theoretically available, and practically all revenues come from liquor?

Today's Tribune column: "Open Air conditioning mechanisms."

Alongside the remainder of the annual Harvest Homecoming, Fringe Fest at Bank Street Brewhouse opens today at 2:00 p.m. I decided to leave HH and FF out of the weekly column, instead focusing on aftermath of Monday's council meeting, as modified by the experiences of a life spent drinking, and reading about drinking.

BAYLOR: Open Air conditioning mechanisms.

Modern literature in the West has produced numerous examples of the seasoned drinker as heroic protagonist, both compelling and doomed. These fictional creations reflect an existential aspect of the human condition. To be succinct, what is to be said or done when life’s fundamentally surreal futility seems better assayed through the bottom of a lifted glass, one quickly draining?

No more election day blue law tomfoolery in Indiana.

For as long as I've been blogging, primary and general election days have been dry, at least until the polls closed at 6:00 p.m.

It always was sadly necessary to remind blog readers that owing to the state's inexplicable fondness for archaic blue laws, no alcoholic beverages could be served by licensed establishments at the same time as ostensibly sober people are allowed to vote, often errantly.

No more. The law finally has been scrapped, and on Tuesday (May 4), both NABC locations will observe regular business hours, sans beer tapping restrictions. It's a small step for a civic-minded bibulophile's personal freedom, and a giant leap for simple, basic rationality.

This belatedly scrapping of the election day ban on alcohol sales is but one part of delightfully useful legislation, originally SB 75, and now SEA 75 in finished, signed form. The bill was explained briefly by Rep. Ed Clere last week in his Tribune column last week. Another section, which also took effect immediately upon signing, involves the rationalization of Sunday serving hours. Now they're the same, each day of the week.

Meanwhile, Sunday growler sales for microbreweries and brewpubs will start on Sunday, July 4, otherwise known as Growler Independence Day.

On Tuesday, after voting, there'll be no waiting for Elector. Free at last ... free at last.