booze

Home Brew

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It’s perfectly understandable to me how haunted houses can exist. We have the idea of “ghosts in the machine,” “Artistic DNA,” and omnipresent-but-unspecific “vibes”- why not “ghosts in the interior design?” Ghosts that can follow a person or people from place to place, creating the sense of where they’ve been before, and writing an intangible living atlas in the frontal lobes of Those Who Know.

The house where I was raised is a minimum hour drive away and five-plus years back in time from being swiftly and silently bulldozed. My parents now live in an ivory tower of an apartment, nineteen floors above center city Philadelphia. They brought some of their favorite decor from their old house was well as my Bubba’s similarly-leveled house, and have moved into an apartment roughly a twentieth the size of where we used to all live together.

Ghosts in the decor, then, is the only way I can explain spending a few days in the cluttered but cozy guest room and walking out the door in the morning expecting a staircase to the right. It’s the only way I feel like the living room of the Philadelphia high-rise has a piano and fireplace in it that I can feel but not see in their decor of wood, white, cream, gray, and Judaica.

Everything about our old house is there, tucked under the carpet or back in a closet, felt but not seen until you cross the threshold out to the hall. Then I am most certainly in Philadelphia.

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Cocktail Talk

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Back when I first moved to Portland, I was really only familiar with the West side. It’s where my work was, it was the bustling metropolis half where I figured all in the interesting and cool stuff was, and I never really need to cross the Willamette until I got a job in Southeast. Soon after we moved nearby chasing better rent and livability than the suburban hell of Beaverton could offer.

Back then, I was confused and disappointed by the lack of bars with late hours and wondered where Portlands reputation as a drinking town came from. Unless that was limited to beer geeks with thick glasses, beards and flannel, I hadn’t seen a single bar open past 10pm in marked contrast to the local watering holes I was used to even in the suburbs of Atlantic City.

I’m bellied-up to the bar at Holman’s, a recent revived institution of the Laurelhurst neighborhood in Southeast. Posters proudly proclaim their new operating hours- Noon to 2:30am, Monday through Friday. Saturday and Sunday they open at 8 to snag the weekend brunch crowd, but still stay open till 2:30 in the morning to welcome the folks that don’t need a special meal to justify day drinking (or night, for that matter.)

What am I having? A martini. The classic. The eternal. The classy. The basic. Dry and dirty, stirred, served in a coupe glass with a vermouth wash (I should have specified that I like the vermouth left in. If I want vermouth-scented gin, I’ll ask for it- but I’m not gonna be That Guy who causes problems in local bars.)

I had a martini yesterday too, in another bar across town. This bar, an upscaled dive bar trying to take in the 5pm “drinks and party” crowd, apologized for not serving my martini with a big ice cube and prepared it in a rocks/lowball glass.

The cocktail was fine, but because of the glass I had to drink it quickly. Accident? Intent? Gender politics? The Blood of the Lamb? Who knows why a bartender would serve a martini unasked for in an unorthodox glass?

What has me wondering today, in a filling bar that I may soon abandon for home (where the booze is paid for and pants are optional) is cocktails themselves and why I enjoy (as my sister called it) “classical drinking.”

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Spruce Tips and Rum Sips

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I get so tired of this world sometimes.

The ignorance, the arrogance, and the eager cruelty on parade into our eyes and brains (whether in caution or praise) gets to be way too much after a while.

Earlier this week was Passover. We didn’t do a Seder this year because timing and activity didn’t work out in our favor. Instead, Emily made chicken satay for dinner. I sat on the porch typing away at this piece after having scrolled through far too much nonsense. That’s one reason this blog post is so late- I simply haven’t had the bandwidth after coming back from Philadelphia.

I finished a small glass of grog (because rum is alright for Passover and I had rice lager waiting to be paired with dinner) and I chatted with a dear friend about the logistics of making Sephardic matzo for a change- as opposed to the hard, cracker-like Ashkenazi matzah I’ve had my entire life.

I wore white linen, watched the light change on Mount Tabor as the sun went down, and I’m listened to Ladino music as I wrote (but Zac Brown Band’s tribute to Jimmy Buffett, “Pirates and Parrots,” is still in my head.)

I spent the day in the sun. Here’s what I have to say about it all.

Glad I finally found a tweed vest that goes with that hat. Thanks Goodwill!
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Time In A Bottle- In Praise of Whiskey

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It’s easy to be staggered by even a small selection. If the legendary Fountain of Youth were real and the Water of Life changed character and flavor with every drop, I’m not sure I’d care which one I got. When each “drop” can cost between $20 and $2000+, though… one feels the need to be a little choosy.

While my dad loves wine and passed his knowledge of tasting and experiencing wine down to me well enough, wine just never sang in me the same way whiskey and beer have. No less an art form, requiring no less craft and patience and care, people have spent their lives in pursuit of their perfect dram, let alone the perfect one. Among my goals in life is to have my own little whiskey collection- not large by any means, but each bottle curated with care to suit any situation myself or my guest might bring to my bar.

What’s stopping me? In order to have a collection of whiskeys, one must either make enough money to buy more whiskey than one can buy quickly, or drink it slowly enough that a collection can accumulate. Either track is, alas, remarkably challenging.

Tellingly, the word “whiskey” is derived from the Gaelic “uisgebatha,” which translates to “water of life.” If legends and folktales tell us anything, the quest for the Water of Life is anything but easy or short. In my own meandering experience, however, it is incredibly enjoyable.

Piss on picklebacks at your own risk.
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Food and Drink- Keeping it Local

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Growing up in my wine enthusiast father’s house, I started learning about alcohol at 13. My sisters and I were passed small sips of whatever he and my mother were drinking, gently quizzed on what we tasted and smelled as far as our early-teen brains could describe ”flavor notes,” and then given an instructive lecture on that particular wine, where it came from, what caused those flavors, and the idea of terroir– that you could taste the unique chemistry of the soil and climate in the products of it’s earth.

I can tell you now that, despite my father’s instruction, I never really fell in love with wine. Unless it’s especially unusual, I will always enjoy wine as “interesting fun grape juice.” Unless it’s terrible, then I just don’t finish.

My dad was not speaking into a void though. What he said DID land and plant a seed, although it grew to be more inclined to beer and liquor, which I can say I then cultivated with the hearty fertilizers of sociology, history, anthropology, and being really damned curious when faced with the unfamiliar-but-promising.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
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