How to Drink Like an Occultist
Add lavender, pineapple Gomme, Rihei ginger Schochu, and cacao; congratulate yourself for having such a fine set of taste buds; then sip like the submissive homosexual you are.
Friday night is when I throttle the shit out of my left hemisphere. I unleash on it like a life-timer on a sadistic guard during a prison riot. The army often rolls in Saturday morning and throttles me back in return, occasionally with horrific results, but for a few glorious hours on Friday, I had that bastard in a headlock.
It's probably the closest the right hemisphere comes to violence. Violence is the left hemisphere's MO, though it's a spectrum thing and some forms of the violence are so mild (e.g., rushing about like you have anything of jack-shit importance in your life), you don't even recognize it.
But when it comes to drinking, the right hemisphere can rise up violently, at least in my (too frequent) experience.
Drinking is, you see, the most right-hemispheric thing in the world. Overstated? Probably, but no matter: It's hard-core right hemispheric, if for no other reason that it's hard-core anti-left hemispheric, kinda like mindfulness meditation: I don't know WTF I'm doing in that lotus position, and I know I look stupid as hell, but at least I know I'm putting a boot on Old LH's neck (which, let's face it, might be the neurological name of Old Scratch himself).
That's also drinking. I often end up looking stupid as hell and then my wife has to rush me out of the public eye, but even at my, ahem, haziest, I at least know my jackboot is coming down hard where it's supposed to.
But alas, the left hemisphere can f' up anything.
Just read Aleister Crowley's Wikipedia entry. The dude was super religious, in all the f'ed up ways. He put religion in service of his left hemisphere. So did Anton LaVey. All occultists do. They take the most sublime thing that radiates truth to the right hemisphere, then defecate on it and feed it to their left hemisphere as a delicacy.
The same thing has happened to the cocktail, that glorious American tradition concocted by Jeremiah, the Professor, Thomas, who took that newfangled thing--the little ice cube--and gave the world its finest invention since trousers. The ice cube let the Professor serve cold, crisp cocktails, not the warm and sugar-filled concoctions the world had been limited to.
Thomas wrote down the magic in his book How to Mix Drinks, dividing drinks into four types: Toddies, Smashes, Sours, and Slings, each containing basic ingredients to cater to basic human moods.
And voila, the world had another glorious bridge over the corpus callosum.
Life is like a cocktail: it's only worth a damn if strong, traditional, and a little bit rowdy. Once you let in the swells, once you add a spritz of lavender, the end is nigh. Leil Leibovitz
But today's "mixologists" (bite me) are jumping that shark altogether and left-hemisphering the shit out of the cocktail. Today's $20 cocktails combine an engineer's love of precision with the self-importance of an Oscar Wilde dandy.
I refuse to worship like an occultist and I sure as hell ain't drinkin' like one. I'm so riled up about it, I'm seriously considering going totally medieval (a/k/a "Old West") on the mixologists' asses and start ordering a shot and a beer when I walk into the bar. I don't particularly care for either when compared to red wine or the gin and tonic, but damn it, sometimes a guy's gotta set an example, and if that means kneeling on a bare floor during the Eucharistic prayers, I'll damn well grimace and do it.
Liel Leibovitz