I will begin with Tito's Handmade Vodka because it's kind of amazing stuff. The idea for possibly the last drinking challenge was to make good on the plan to pour vodka on my head to test it as a body coolant. The idea was also for me to get Dan Aykroyd's skull vodka since some of it was destined to land on my head anyway. Imagine my chagrin upon learning that skull vodka had been pulled from the liquor store because the skull shaped bottle was too much temptation for teenagers who thought it looked cool. I substituted with Tito's Handmade Vodka only because the name Tito didn't exactly say vodka to me. The individual who accompanied me to the liquor store was very enthusiastic, because apparently Tito's is an award winner that he'd been dying to try (I left him with a few ounces in a juice glass).
Tito's story is rather interesting. He began his career running a dynamite seismic exploration crew for an oil company, before moving on to become a garbage man and then a realtor. He was just some guy who, as a hobby, enjoyed making his own liquor. When he decided to try his hand at vodka, he tirelessly researched by drinking some of every kind that he could find. He is now so skilled that he can not only identify each brand of vodka by taste, but if you hand him a glass of several different vodkas mixed together, he can tell you which brands have been included, and in what proportions. His friends assured him that his product was so good that he should try actually selling it. He financed his distillery - which is across the way from an abandoned rodeo stadium - with 14 different credit cards. His goal was to produce the cleanest and purest vodka ever tasted. He designed it not only to be delicious - as delicious as vodka can be - but also to control what kind of drunk you would have and experience no hangover. He won the Double Gold Medal at the 2001 World Spirit Competition in San Francisco, which means that every judge deemed his vodka the best, beating out the likes of Grey Goose and Belvedere.
But enough about Tito and more about Saturday night. The weather wasn't quite warm enough for the vodka test to be very telling, so I improvised body heat by donning an emergency rain poncho and doing 50 jumping jacks in front of a samurai who was made very uncomfortable. Then the dousing. I experienced an immediate cooling sensation which lasted for a good 45 minutes. I recommend it to anyone who lacks air-conditioning and isn't troubled by the idea of smelling like a distillery. Just for fun, we annointed Sara's belly with a couple of ounces also, each of us saying aloud something that we wished for the twins in life. I wished that Chris and Sara manage to make it past age 45 without becoming grandparents. I don't know that that's even physically possible (at least for Chris), but my sentiment was well-meant.
Tito, for the most part, bestowed me with a slowly evolving and controlled drunk, right up until the emotional meltdown I suffered at the end of the night when it was time to go home. It occurs to me that I maybe haven't been handling this pregnancy in the best or healthiest of ways. The truth is that I don't deal very well with change and the last Saturday night before the births really marked the end of an era. Also I'm a bit of a disaster of a human being, and I've come to rely on Chris and Sara to take care of me in a multitude of ways.* Who's going to take care of me now?
My cab driver cheered me up slightly by putting 80's dance music on the radio and teaching me some conversational Swahili of which I remember none. It's too bad, because being able to say "I really like this song" and "I expect I'm rather intoxicated", and then giving directions to where I live could have come in handy when visiting Nairobi. On second thought...
I woke up after 6 hours sleep feeling very refreshed and hangover-free. Still emotional, but cleansed, in a strange way. Bring on the babies.
*Friendship with me has likely prepared Chris and Sara somewhat for the adolescent years, since I seem to be on a maturation loop, auto-resetting every 3 or 4 years and experiencing the mistakes of my late teens and early 20's all over again.
No comments:
Post a Comment