Todd Terwilliger

I love drinking and smoking. Wait, let me rephrase that: I love the act of drinking and smoking, the affectations, the culture, the pomp and circumstance that festoon the physical process of smoking and drinking. Of course, I don’t actually drink or smoke so I can only pine at these sacred ceremonies from afar, like Moses looking down onto the land of milk and honey he can never have.

What I find so attractive about these habits is that they are life props, fetish acts that can be endlessly molded and accessorized to match your lifestyle or the lifestyle you secretly (or not so secretly) desire. This is something you can’t do swilling soda or, worse, water. There are only two statements you can make drinking water or soda at a bar: you’re either a recovering (or not so much) alcoholic or you’re an undercover cop and/or religious zealot. Neither one of those archetypes is particularly desirable, at least not by me, at least not now.

Because I cannot take advantage of myriad possibilities around nicotine and alcohol, I can only look to my friends to live the capital-ell Life that I cannot. Mostly, they’re coming up short. Very short.

I blame the terrible ascendancy of wine. Wine is a beautiful drink, spoken of in poetry and song, revered and worshiped by king and commoner alike. There’s a reason for this. Wine has a true transformative power: to turn anyone instantly into a blithering snob. For the king, it merely confirms his already impressive imperial snobbery. For the commoner, it confers upon him the snobbery he was robbed of by his pedestrian birth. Either way, like a cancer, wine infects the body and mind with a withering pomposity. It is fatal. There is no cure.

The glass swirling, the lip puckering, that horribly fake super-taste power (I detect just a hint of northern white oak) are all absolutely intolerable. Nothing good comes from it. Nothing. The blathering on vintages, grapes, wineries, and regions are endless. It’s rotisserie baseball for the uppity lush. Did you see the Pinot Noir last night? I can’t believe I left him on my bench!

I need my friends to drink scotch, whiskey, a good short glass drink, a short glass, tinkling ice, that peeled-lip look when the first gulp goes down hot, a drink that oozes out of the bottle like a molten metal. Now that’s drinking I can get behind. That’s drinking with substance.

You can weave a tapestry out of that sort of drinking: how you hold your glass, pinched between two fingers or full in the mitt? Do you slug it down in one shot or sip at the edges? These are important considerations that reflect the drinker’s approach, the fine waltz between the drink and drinker. It speaks to who you are, what you’re about. Nobody cares how you hold a wine glass. It’s either dainty or daintier. Fine if you’re training to be dandy or fop, not so fine for everyone else.

Unfortunately, so far I have not been able to convince anyone to take that turn. They’re all plodding straight down the road like the Joads limping after the Grapes of Wrath. Hopeless. Well, mostly hopeless. I’ll keep trying to bring them around. There’s no finer pursuit than the rescue of friends from a descent into false pretension. It’s the least I can do. I can’t enter the promise land myself, but I can show the way. Now, how to get them to follow?

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