a public service renouncement

All the holiday cheer around me has me thinking about booze . . . I don’t really miss the sense of intoxication, but I miss the extreme rush, whiskey, on one hand, and the subtle flavors, wine, on the other.  Wine I can still sip, though I can’t really “drink” it – maybe a small glass along with a bottle of soda water.  But I’ve basically become a puny light beer guy.
    
I’m sitting in a bar right now, though – not a proper sleazy bar, but just the afterthought bar at the coffee place where I normally work, early mornings, with fair coffee.  Thinking about holidays and booze, at this beat-up old dark oak bar.
    
Something I hadn’t thought about in years was the Engineers’ Depth Charge.  When I was a junior and senior at the University of Maryland, I’d go to a sleazoid joint just across Route 1 from the Engineering Building (I worked afternoons in the library there), where they served up Depth Charges – a short draft of whatever into which the bartender drops a jigger of house bourbon.  You knock it back in one manly chug – even if you’re female – before the bourbon has had much of a chance to diffuse into the beer.  A curious rush of coolness and fire.
 
I highly recommend it if you want to wind up with pancreatitis or cirrhosis in your sixties.  If you’d rather live to a ripe old age, I’d suggest you stick to the beer and just imagine the bourbon.
 
This has been a public service meditation.
 
Joe