Bubblegum

by Adam Levin

One big advantage—or disadvantage, depending on your angle—to having second thoughts is the way they lead you to have third and fourth ones. Fifth and sixtieth and seven hundredth ones. They pile on, and draw attention to themselves, away from their objects, distance the immediate, slow things down.

I understood instantly why the Scotch was so expensive. Rather than tasting like the necessary suffering you had to endure on your way to a buzz, it tasted like something primarily intended to be sensed with the tongue. The tiniest nip of it filled your mouth with flavor after flavor, flavors that you’d never guess would complement each other, and the flavors seemed to take whole minutes to fade, which made you want to talk about them. It made you want to name them, to pin them down, as much toward the goal of knowing which ones to more actively seek when you took your next sip as to see if others would name the same ones as you, or point out the ones you’d failed to notice.

“You know, I don’t know what you’ve got going on, but we’re about to do apparoh at this Spanish place,” he said. “Oh yeah?” I said. I didn’t know what that meant, apparoh. Do you know? I’ll tell you. It’s my new favorite thing. From now on I’m gonna do it every day. It’s a drink or a small food you eat with people before dinner, and if you’re having a good time with it, it either turns into dinner or more apparoh. The whole reason these people here eat dinner so late is because they need to have enough time after work to have apparoh first, which is, in my opinion, and the opinion of anyone worth listening to, better than dinner.