“The waiting is the hardest part.”
Tom Petty
#blackwednesdaysmatter
It sits there. Five days away, the biggest bar night of the year, two years removed from the last one.
Black Wednesday.
I will have the traditional BYCU Special Edition next Wednesday.
Today, I wait. I’m itching for a drink, but I’m on proto-detox this weekend. Not only do I want to give my liver and system a chance to withstand the barrage, but these next few days are my last chance to meet my weight goal of 170 pounds (I sit at 173, after tipping the scales at 198 in February 2019 . . . it’s been a very slow and uneven effort . . . picture a 30-month bear stock market graph).
I had a few gin-and-tonics at my new men’s Catholic book club Wednesday, but that’s it for this week. Three drinks.
I sated my urge to drink by reading a disturbing article in Modern Drunkard Magazine about salamander brandy.
It’s really gross.
This Slovenian drink is made by tossing a salamander into a jar of fermented fruit. They’ll thrash so savagely for their lives that they’ll secrete every gram of their toxic mucous as they die. I think you then remove the salamander, then add wormwood (making it absinthe-like, perhaps?), then let it ferment for a few weeks.
And then you drink it and start raping things.
Apparently, it’s a maddening aphrodisiac. Picture Harvey Weinstein on bath salts. The author of the piece says folks who get drunk on salamander brandy lose all control and will engage anyone or anything. It sounds like what they must serve at happy hour in the San Francisco bathhouses.
The stuff is also toxic. If you use two salamanders, the concoction could kill you. The author strongly cautions anyone from making their own, but also notes that the drink has been forced underground in Slovenia, so you pretty much need a clandestine contact or need to learn how to make your own.
It’s the kind of thing that makes me shake my head. I can’t even get into Viagra and a bottle of wine. I can’t imagine drinking a concoction of wormwood, fermented fruit, and salamander mucous.
Well yeah, I might have chased a couple [manders] around
All it ever got me was down.
