Drinking, Writing, Staying Sober

There’s more reason to do some committed drinking right now, I’ll suggest, than ever before.

And yet, as with many things comprising our human existence, the contrary is also true: If you don’t drink, if you’ve remained steadfastly sober for a while, more power to you – and now is not the time to 86 that hardwon status.

That last situation, especially, that can be shored up via Kristi Coulter’s wise and even refreshingly humorous nonfiction account of achieving sobriety: Nothing Good Can Come From This, a fine paperback, reviewed here about a year ago.

On the other hand, for those still happily tippling, let me re-recommend a novel replete with single-malt Scotch whiskeys and contentious Highland reprobates and maybe even a goddam werewolf: Andrew Ervin’s Burning Down George Orwell’s House, as lauded in this review from 2015.

More recently, and more in the short-form scheme of things, there’s Austin-based barkeep Ty Harvey with his unique and stylish performance-art take on cocktails, as collected in a tiny tome called Seven Drinks, which we hipped you to earlier this year.

And finally, a recently posted, terribly short (and totes hilarious) bit, that you can read for yourself right now without purchasing a dead-tree edition of anything from anywhere: Bull Garlington’s “Five Awful Cocktails to Make As You Run Out of Everything While the Goddam World Burns Down” at Medium. (Sure, you say, but is that the only time the Chicago scribe has waxed funny about something? Oh no, once and future world traveler, it sure as hell isn’t.)

That should provide sufficient food (or, er, drink) for thought for a while, right? ’Til we meet again, then, citizen: Hang tough and hail Eris!