Night Train Express (and cult film spectacular!)

People, I am in a damn good mood. Classes are over, just finished my last paper, and I've only got two exams coming up. Life is doing pretty well. The Cruellest Month is pretty much over, and things are going great.

Let's see how quick Night Train can fuck that up.

It hurtses our liver.

So yeah. Does it need much of an introduction? It's bottled by Gallo, the same people who brought us Thunderbird. It's a legendary bum wine, and apparently gives you a comatose buzz rather than a frenzied one.

So all aboard--train's headed down, and let's see how far it goes (spoiler: it crashes)

LOOK
No wine should be this color. It's not pink. It's not red. It's some weird fucking purple color in-between the two. Mauve, I guess. No, wait, more like mulberry.

Anyway, this is a really unnatural color. This is the wine equivalent of the Uncanny Valley--not light or dark enough in either way to look natural or edible. It looks manufactured and wrong--not clearly gutrot like the MD Blue Raspberry was, but a little examination and the facade of respectability peels away to reflect the horrible artificiality.

I've drunk things you people wouldn't believe.

NOSE
A pretty strong candy smell here. This is the first non-blue-raspberry fortified wine I've chugged down, but it still smells surprisingly like red Jolly Ranchers or Hawaiian Punch. I'm really disheartened by how little this smells like grapes, or even vinegar. Just from the smell alone, it hardly seems like it actually counts as--
"citrus wine and natural flavors."

Oh god. Oh god. It's not actually wine. It's-- even MD puts "grape" somewhere on its label. This is-- this-- wow. This is actually fundamentally broken on some level of reality. This is just wrong, and there is no one on earth who would say otherwise.

Meh, at least he's not drinking Night Train.

TASTE
I gotta say, I kinda like the fact that this is clearly designed to be chugged by the bottle. That is the only thing I like though. It's incredibly sweet--like, NyQuil sweet--designed to suppress the bitterness of the terrible, terrible alcohol. It's like a beautiful woman who also happens to sweat poison-- she may be pretty, but you feel even more betrayed because her one redeeming feature is designed solely to hide the pure destructive evil.

Yes, I know that metaphor didn't make sense. Screw you. I've been drinking.

I don't have a problem, you have a problem...with me!

Well fine. Fuck you too. I don't need you, I have Night-- oh god. God, I'm sorry.

Look, it's just bad. It tastes hypersweet, like a child's punch with merlot poured in and some extra sugar added for good measure. It's not as bad as Mad Dog Bling Bling, but the basic thing is that it's designed as hobo wine, every part of it is calculated solely to rot away your cortex and destroy your stomach. It may be charming, but it's still a killer, and the charm only exists to cover that up.

No no no, less likable, more poisonous.

That's more like it.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Honestly though, if you really wanna get drunk, this might be your best per-dollar bet. It's at least drinkable, even if it tastes like cough syrup, hawaiian punch, and gasoline. It's hobo wine, pure and simple. This is the kind of thing this blog was founded for, and it may be the first thing I've reviewed that I would actually consider buying again if I was really, really desperate to get absolutely smashed.

Not that it's good. Oh no. It's fucking cancer. But it's more like lymph cancer than, say, ball cancer (Jacquin's).

Aww. I made myself sad.

Speaking of Bum Wine: week of Mad Dog. Soon. Summer. Gonna be pretty much a pilgrimage to Hell and partway back.

Travelers Club Gin

Gin is the spirit that started my love of good liquor. I'd had rum and vodka fairly consistently throughout my Freshman year at college (because one of my suitemates was a literal, n0-jokes alcoholic), but it was over that summer when my parents poured me a strong gin and tonic and I discovered how great Tanqueray was that I decided I really liked drinking. I don't drink it as much now, having really gotten into whisky and good vodka, but when it gets hot, I still like to curl up with a powerful g&t or a French 75 and enjoy the crispness.

Travelers Club has ruined that experience.

The sun actually just bought Billy some TC.

So, let's kick back and see where our travels take us, shall we?

LOOK

I mean, it's clear. I can say that I really hate the label, and I really hate the name. The Travellers Club is an exclusive, legendary English Gentleman's Club for worldly men who probably drink Hendricks or Beefeater. Travelers Club is a company that makes bad, bad liquor (they also do vodka, as if the market wasn't already glutted with three-dollar vodka trying to steal Five O Clock's crown of sorrows). But their three-fifty gin is alone on that shelf in our local liquor store. it is absolute bottom barrel. The stuff the Alpha Couple drinks in "Game Shows Touch Our Lives," from whence this blog's subtitle comes? That's Broker's Gin, and it was on the shelf above this one. Even the "I hope you die / I hope we both die" Alpha Couple would stay away from this.

Traveler's Club tries to look classy, and it is going to Hell for lying.

NOSE
This doesn't smell like gin, it smells like Pine-Sol. That's not a metaphor. That is not a simile. That is a straight-up comparison. It's not as pungent, but it really just smells like fucking pine sap soaked in booze. No citrus, no sweetness, just that pungent industrial odor that's starting to become like background noise as the cheap booze slowly erodes my cortex and permeates every aspect of my life.

Hold on, lemme see if I can find my liver real quick.

TASTE (STRAIGHT)
Not only is it bad, it fails on every level of what gin is supposed to be. It's incredibly un-smooth, with a peppery taste to it. Pepper! Like vodka! The opposite of smooth. There's absolutely nothing resembling a citrus flavor here, and it tastes more like a pine tree than it does juniper. There's also a really faint celery flavor. I have no idea how that even happens. It basically feels like I was just mugged by Swamp Thing.

Let's get Alan Moore writing the series again. We can make this happen.

TASTE (MIXED)
Making a very weak gin & seltzer (we were out of tonic water) is a pretty passable way to knock this back--you can cover up the badness fast enough and if you just chug it you can get the whole experience over with.

You may notice that chugging defeats the entire point of a gin and seltzer/tonic. Well, welcome to the fucking Travelers Club, where everything is hand-carved from failure and pointlessness!

However, I figured that now might be a good time to unveil a recipe I've been working on: the Pax Bisonica!

Named in honor of the late, great, Raul Julia's magnetic performance in the Street Fighter movie, I made this cocktail to try and capture both Bison's smoothness and the incredible power simmering underneath. Also, it's orange because there's a scene where (in a fuzzy lounge version of his uniform) he tries to seduce Chun-Li he tries to seduce her via an orange drink (with Bison-logo cocktail toothpicks), and you know whatever Bison's drinking it has his name.

1.5 ounces each gin, ginger ale, and orange juice
1 heavy splash each bitters and Worcestershire sauce (or Thai fish sauce, as Bison is supposed to be Thai)
ice, in a rocks glass

it's a really heavily-flavored drink, and it's got a real kick to it while still being fairly smooth and sippable. And it's the perfect way to down Travelers Club. Because the powerful flavors do a good job of drowning out the terrible, just as Julia makes an absolutely abysmal film amazing.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Raul Julia once played Mack the Knife. Just think about how awesome that was (I have the recording, even though they only ever released it on vinyl. Think how awesome I am).

Also Seagram's is like a buck fifty more and absolutely fantastic for that price, just get it instead.

Inver House Blended Whisky.

I'm Scottish. Clan Douglas, pretty much the clan of English-killin' and Wilde-fuckin' (and fisticuffs). And I adore scotch whisky. It's my drink of choice by a long stretch. There is nothing on earth that will make me happier than a warm glass of Laphroaig, a crisp Glenlivet, or even simple Johnny Red.

So I take it as a Cromwell-level insult that Barton Brands, the same sweltering assboils who brought us Kentucky Gentleman and Riva, would dare to try and peddle their own brand of whisky to me.
Let's look at the bottle and run down the list of things that are wrong with it:

NAME: Inver House Green Plaid. Not named after a person (Johnnie Walker, J&B, Dewar's). Not in Gaelic (virtually every single malt). No one is willing to take the blame for this, and it's not authentic enough to cobble together a string of consonants. And "green plaid," combined with all the fake heraldry on the label? Please.

Barcode right in the middle of the label. Not even on the back. There is no pride here. No honor. This whisky has been broken by the Empire and is merely shilling itself out.

"Aged 36 months." 3 years is a good age for, well, pretty much anything except scotch. If you're gonna be that hasty, why bother making scotch? That's the equivalent of microwaving a lobster dinner.

"Imported by and bottled for Barton Imports." And here it comes together. See, blended whisky is made from a wide variety of malts from different distilleries, who sell leftovers to blenders (who often distill their own, as well), who then assemble their whisky from a precise ratio and work to develop a unique flavor. There's nothing wrong with this--the flavor of Black Label can hold its own against any single malt--but in this case, I can't help but wonder exactly what this is blended from. I can only assume that it is made from the refuse of the product of every brewer indignant that you would pay 6 dollars for scotch.

There's no gag here--Ewan McGregor is simply a glorious man. And he hates me for drinking this.

LOOK
A really pale golden color. Sort of an amber, a little more yellow than I like my scotch, but there's honestly nothing wrong here. I mean, Glenlivet's honestly a little lighter.

NOSE
This is the primary offender. It smells like it looks--like apple juice. Apple juice undercut by an aroma of alcohol. And then undercut by a layer of whisky. It's like a turducken, if the turkey and duck were instead made from football skin and packing peanuts. Scotch is supposed to have the strongest, most nuance aroma of any liquor on earth, and yet this smells like a fucking fermented juice box.

TASTE (STRAIGHT)
(Portrait of the journalist courtesy of Beta Burns Babylon)

The first thing I taste when I take a swig of Inver House is the alcohol. The second thing is the fact that it's way too sweet--like, bourbon-level sweet, only again, there's that applejuice flavor. Then there's the burn, then the whisky aftertaste.

There's nothing to savor here, nothing worth sipping, just the burn and the alcohol flavor. It tastes like 4 parts J&B (which is a pretty sharp-tasting whisky to begin), 2 parts applejuice, and 4 parts Smirnoff.

I just-- how? This may be the least wretched thing I've tasted for this blog (I hate you all), but there is still nothing good about it, just a little less terrible. Again, I just don't know how you start with single malt and somehow wrangle it down to this. There's bad flavors here that shouldn't even logically exist in scotch.

TASTE (MIXED)
First I decided to make a Flying Scotsman, although with a little jerry-rigging substitution for the sweet vermouth. This actually wasn't a bad idea, and I bet it would have been an even better way to force it down if I'd had the real stuff (I used an ounce of Riesling and a splash of merlot, with some extra sugar). The bitters also add some of the richness that Inver House sorely lacks. If you have to buy bottom-rung stuff, then, this is the way to do it (although a few drops of Angostura Bitters can actually make a lot of stuff more palatable--making an Old Fashioned out of the Jacquin's also proved to be the best way to choke that down). This, however, is mainly because Inver House is so thin and frail that the wine and bitters can really force it down and make you forget it even exists in the cocktail.

Left: Vermouth. Right: Inver House

I also tried a little half-size Smoky Martini (scotch instead of vermouth), with a couple modifications (orange twist instead of lemon, one drop of bitters for color and a little accentuation). The problem with this, of course, is that it's not a good way to get rid of the Inver House at all. At this rate, one flask of Inver will take three bottles of gin to use up, and there are so many things I'd rather do with my gin.

The other problem is that it tastes pretty bad, and burns like a bitch. You can still, sadly, taste the worst parts of the Inver House but none of the actual whisky flavor. Also, good god does it hurt the back of my throat. It's really just a ruination of good gin, and I usually don't get angry at Seagram's until I'm 3 g&t's deep.

FINAL THOUGHTS
I had shit to celebrate earlier today. I was drinking a Tito's Vodka Sling. It was amazing. That's what you should drink instead. That's the conclusion of this review: go to the store, grab a bottle of Tito's, a bottle of Angostura, and make yourself a few of those. That's the best way to drink Inver House-- to not drink it at all, and instead go for something else. Something good.

Seriously, glorious.

Busch NA

In the continuing trend of giving my liver a bit of a break (at least on swill-- bought a bottle of amazing Bowmore Single Malt with my tax rebate that is looking at me like it resents me for slumming), I'm actually reviewing something non-alcoholic this week. Not that I'm not reviewing spirits-- oh no, this is that which should not be. Non-alcoholic beer.

I do not drink...alcoholic beer.

This isn't even good non-alcoholic beer. I mean, I'm pretty sure that our last non-real-beer-drinking president wouldn't even drink Busch NA, and he was pretty much addicted to bad decisions (killer album, by the way).

So, then, how is it?

LOOK
Damn my journalistic integrity for making me do this. It's canned, four-bucks-for-a-sixpack BUSCH. But nope. I gotta tell you how it looks. I have to go the freezer, get out my special Achewood 8th Anniversary pint glass that I save for really nice beers, and I have to fill it up with this.
But anyway, it looks like fuckin' cheap beer, is what it looks like. It's your basic amber/yellow, dark-piss color, not-at-all opaque cheap Busch beer. It's not like you can see what makes it really bad. Only Lamont Cranston knows what shadows haunt the hearts of beers.
SMELL
Not much of one at all, which, considering the track record of this blog, is honestly a point in its favor. It smells more like already-stale beer, like spilled beer left to soak for a week, than it does like an actual beverage. Certainly nothing special here, move along people.

TASTE
I wanna start off by saying that Busch NA is not refreshing. That's pretty much the only justification for drinking this quality of beer if you can afford better (and you can--I'm a college student with no job and I can afford better)-- to cool off after a hot day, quench your thirst, get a little buzz going. And, since the latter is firmly out of the question (O'Douls has more alcohol in it), and it actually makes me thirstier and dehydrates me a little more, there is absolutely no reason for this beer to exist.

Ah, but Jasper, you say, like the smug motherfucker you are with your nice alcohol, how does it sit upon the pallet?

It tastes like I just ate a plain slice of bread and washed it down with some municipal tap water. Actually, no. There's a really faint carrot-and-onion taste at the bottom. I don't even know how that happens. But there is. Like I said, this is sort of a really minor Lovecraftian horror-- it's not actually horrifying, but it's still fundamentally wrong.See also.

Taste (Mixed)
I actually did find one way to make this more vaguely tolerable: drop a couple shots of Jose Cuervo in, stir it around, and knock it back. Pretty much the worst carbomb ever, like one made by a mildly retarded Irish Nationalist, and it tastes like you're drinking water out of a cactus, but at least there's definite flavor to it.

The astute among you may notice that two shots of tequila is a good bit stronger than one can of beer. I want you to think about that. To consider how hard Busch NA has failed.

It is non-alcoholic beer that has actually worsened my drinking problem.

And that's when I started drinking Busch NA.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Don't really have many this time--it was more aggressively mediocre than outright awful. Keep your eyes peeled for next time, though. I'm gonna get angry.

Jacquin's Peach Flavored Brandy

I know that Peach Brandy doesn't really fit in with my usual MO-- you know, the hard-drinking, hard-living, gin-and-scotch chugging Bukowskian (right? right? please?)--but I'm gonna level with you folks here: my liver kinda hurts. On Sunday I polished off half a bottle of MD (it tastes less hobo-y and awful the more you drink of it), and since it's gotten warm I've been having a lot of gin and tonics and old fashioneds, and at least one day a week for the past month I've been kinda destroying myself for your amusement.

Like Battle Royale, but the explosive collar's around my liver.

What I'm saying is, I gotta take a bit of a break. Expect the next couple weeks to be no less awful, drunk, and angry, but I'm gonna be dwelling on things that just taste awful rather than things that actually physically hurt.

So with that in mind, I walked into the liquor store, seriously considered just drinking Amaretto Liqueur straight, experienced my weekly anger at the fact that the people who make Kentucky Gentleman try and make Scotch (Inver House-- coming soon!) and then just walked up to the brandy aisle and grabbed the cheapest thing they had. Let's see if my plan to not hate myself by the end of the night works.

LOOK
It actually doesn't look awful. Really deep rich color, that lovely dark-orange/mahogany tint that my favorite whiskies have. You can't tell from the look of this that it's absolutely terrible.

Then on the label it says "Caramel Color Added," so yeah, fuck this already. It's like two children in a trenchcoat, if children were bad brandy, a trenchcoat was caramel color, and my mouth was...Terminator? Fuck, I don't know. That metaphor sorta fell apart on me. Look, I seriously think I may have damaged my nerve column a little here. Roll with me.

NOSE
Christ, it smells like a goddamn hair salon. That is not a metaphor. That is not hyperbole. That is literal, objective, impartial reporting. (Christ, I'm comparing my peach brandy to my hair salon. I'm also listening to French 60's pop music. Why don't I just write my next post on how dreeeeamy Mr. Darcy is and review my favorite brands of Cosmo?)
It's an incredibly strong smell, too. Like, if you're drinking this, you can't keep it a secret from anyone (so it's like my womanliness in that way too). As soon as I started pouring, the entire room started reeking.

TASTE
This tastes like perfume. Not in the way that, say a little splash of vermouth does. This does not taste like the air in a room with an elderly matron in it, or kissing the neck of a perfumed woman (Yes. Yes, I have kissed a woman. I have a girlfriend. But she's-- she's Canadian). This actually literally tastes like perfume. In no way does this taste like actual alcohol, let alone something as rich as brandy. This tastes like a bunch of creme-saver lifesavers left sitting in a bottle of cheap white wine. It's not just sweet-- there's nothing wrong with sweet liquors; Sailor Jerry rum is one of my absolute favorite things to cowboy on a muggy evening. This is incredibly sweet, in a really thick syrupy way that alcohol logically shouldn't be.

It's like if your grandmother just emptied all the candies out of the bottom of her purse and fuckin' boiled em (only that's not how things would go down in the Moore family. It'd pretty much consist of my grandmother taking the glass away from me and pouring me a martini. My grandmother is a stroke-addled little pile of awesome).

(There was going to be an illustration, but the second result for "awesome grandmother" is hand-drawn incest porn. So thanks, Internet. Now nobody gets anything.)

It's not just sweet, but candy-sweet, artificially sweet in a way that nothing that gets you drunk--or that you drink, period--should be. It's less like a peach flavor than the syrup from canned peaches. That said, it is probably the most out-and-out drinkable of anything I've reviewed so far. If you don't mind the pure unnatural wrongness, you could use turn to this when you're really desperate and just need to get something.

Oh goddamnit.

FINAL THOUGHTS
There's a scene in The Virgin Suicides (I got a soft spot for that film, I won't-- dammit. Seriously. I'm- I'm- oh just fuck it) where a teenage boy takes a big swig of peach brandy and then kisses his prom date with a mouthful of it.

If it was Jacquin's, it might help explain that whole "mysterious suicide" thing.

Issue 5: Mad Dog 20/20 "Bling Bling" Blue Raspberry

Mad Dog is legendary hobo-wine. Perhaps even the most legendary-- it is to other bumwines what Brando is to other actors, a mirror that shows them that they are fools. It's the encapsulation of terrible stuff to get you drunk, and things like it are the reason I started this blog.

I feel ready now. I've made it past Five O' Clock, I bested the Gentleman in an honorable duel, and now I'm ready to try and put down the Mad Dog.

Pictured: Hubris

I got myself a bottle of the sickly candy-blue "Blue Raspberry" flavor. Oh no, it's not made from raspberries. It's made from "grape wine and citrus spirits," and it is bright blue like a child's punch. I should point out now that even Mad Dog's normal red wine just says "red grape wine" on the label. Even the Lost Vineyards could manage to use one type of grape.

Actually, the bottle label has a gold chain dangling from the "MD" that said "Bling Bling." I think the flavor is "Bling Bling Blue Raspberry" then. I don't know. I really don't. I guess they're trying to market to african-americans.

Using the term "bling bling" isn't racist, but trying at all to say that any ethnic group has tastes in line with this is. Saying that you think black people would enjoy this is like saying you honestly think they were happier as slaves.

Before you get offended, keep in mind that calling someone a slavery apologist is a hell of a lot worse than pointing out that they make Mad Dog.

LOOK
It's fucking blue.

STINK
I'm not gonna lie here people. I've got some trepidation here. I actually threw down pretty hard last weekend (girlfriend was in town, we realized the bottle of Maker's Mark was still pretty full), and I think this blog is really starting to eat away at my liver. I say this because it physically feels bad to smell this. I get a little queasy. That could just be the sugar though-- it smells sickeningly sweet, pretty much like a bag of Jolly Ranchers (and it is the exact same color as the blue raspberry Jolly Rancher too), and underneath all that is the really vile chemical smell.

Congratulations, Mad Dog. You have ruined the flavor of candy. It's like someone took my halloween bucket when I was a kid and just left it to soak in ethanol until now. Essentially, this is what you would actually get from the attempted combination of a spoonful of sugar and cough syrup.

FUUUUUCK YOOOOOU.

TASTE
Plenty of things I've drunk for this blog made me angry. This is the first that made me sad. I actually felt legitimately ashamed to drink this, like I'd taken some terrible turn with my life. This is hobo wine that actually makes you feel like a hobo. And with the fucking candy flavor, not even a dignified Tom Waits hobo. No. This is for hobos who wanna get drunk, but also really like Blo-pops. If I knocked back a little bit of the red grape wine, I could at least say to myself that yeah, it's awful, but at least I'm still a man. No. No. This is for alcoholic children. This is the American Nightmare. This is Hell.

Seriously though-- it tastes about like you'd expect from the earlier text. Pretty much like a Jolly Rancher soaked in cough syrup, or like rancid fruit.

Pictured: Fall

FINAL THOUGHTS

You may notice in that picture that there is a bottle of Windex in the background the exact same color as the wine--WINE--in my glass. Also, it doesn't even get you drunk as fast as red grape flavor. What the fuck, Mad Dog? Why do you hate the homeless and black people so much?

RUN, COWARD. I HUNGER

I see.

Issue 4: Five O' Clock vodka

When I first bought Riva vodka for the premier of this esteemed weblog(esteemed means painful, right? The booze has wrecked me), my roommate and I jokingly observed that there was a brand of vodka named “Five O'Clock Vodka.” We commented that, since it at least came in a glass bottle (despite costing $3.55), the Riva had to be worse.

The woman behind the counter sighed and said, “Oh honey, it don't get much worse than Five O' Clock.”

The name is so wonderfully endearing to me. Unlike Popov, which lays claims to some sort of Russian-ness, the Five knows that it is sad, sad vodka for drinking and ignoring your harpy of a wife and the reminders as to how low your life has fallen. There's a level of unpretension there that most liver-killing barely-palatable Rasputinjuice avoids.

Also, Five O'Clock boasts in ornate cursive on its label that it is bottled in Scobeyville, NJ. When I think “bottled in Jersey,” I do not think “drinkable.” I mostly think Master Shake.

LOOK
As stated in my premiere review, Vodka shouldn't really have a look. I will say that I like Five's labeling, though. It would look almost respectable if not for the world's saddest name printed on the label. It's kind of like a beautiful woman named Adolfina-- it may look like you've got some good times ahead of you, but the name should clue you in that the people making it have filled it up with poison.

NOSE
You know what? Evaluating something's “nose” is a holdover of the fact that I'm a whisky lover. This does not have “nose.” If anything, it has

WHEEZING SKULL HOLE
Pretty much like rubbing alcohol and sugar. It doesn't have the turpentine burn of our old buddy Mr. Boston, but there's a real awful candy sweetness there. If you've ever read Lanark (you haven't, but run with me here), this is pretty much the candy-gasoline smell I imagine the food of The Institute to have. And that food was a metaphor for mankind's apathetic consumption of one other. So this pretty much smells like the crimes of modern society.

TASTE
One small sip of this just tasted bad—sweet and burning, like a really really run-down version of Van Gogh vodka. But it was when I poured myself a shot of of it and knocked that back that I really felt awful.

The taste pretty much just rams the back of your throat like an uncaring lover and then your mouth gets full of that awful candy sweetness. If it's always Five O' Clock somewhere, that somewhere is Tangiers and it is sinister—this is what Mugwump milk tastes like, only it actually shortens your life. There's a bit of actual grain flavor there, but it tastes somehow like artificial bread and sugar. Like eating a gas-station honey bun dipped in grain alcohol. It's like a woman you think you can tolerate because the only thing she does on dates is check her phone too often but after you go to bed with her you realize that you've glossed over her awfulness with your own desperation and are willfully ignoring the fact that she invites the cat into bed with you and keeps talking about her parents and how they mistreated her.

TASTE (MIXED)

So I just poured myself a white trash screwdriver because that actually pops up as one of the first google results if you try and find information on this stuff, like the names and family members of those responsible. It tastes somehow thick and filmy, like something out of a beaker that also faintly glows. There's still that really unnatural bitterness there.

It's as though you try to spend time with the girl from above and your friends, to tolerate her more or see if they will confirm your suspicions. But she somehow does become tolerable, and for one blissful evening, you forget that every time she smiles it has become like an iron file on your rib bones, and as you spend more and more time with her every bit of your extremities slowly numbs until the only feeling left is a foul taste in your mouth and a swelling sickness between your lungs.

Eventually you realize that this is what you've devoted your life to getting, and that the things you're passionate about, that you want to devote your life to (single malt scotch, in this metaphor) are out of your reach, that you will be going to bed with Five O' Clock tonight, every night, that all you can taste anymore is artificiality and grain alcohol.

And that you would rather be alone, and sober, than be drinking this.

Oh honey, it don't get much worse than Five O' Clock.

FINAL THOUGHTS

My girlfriend reads this blog. Hi honey. I love you.