I’m not much of a drinker. This is evident, as I sit here with my Bulleit Bourbon that isn’t even in a whiskey glass and doesn’t use the proper ice. I own neither. I am quite new to the drinking world and I must say I do it as much for taste as for how it makes me feel–emotionally. There is something psychologically fulfilling about holding a fine drink–be it wine or harder stuff. I recognize that it has more to do with the culture of drinking and connecting to that history that follows really good alcohol than it has anything to do with a need to be inebriated. In truth I can count the number of times I’ve been drunk on one hand, and even that is too much for me.
I come from a family of drinkers. Specifically my step dad took to the bottle. It tore up his liver and ended his life by the time I was twelve. I never got over that. I remain convinced that my life to a wrong turn the day he died and I feel if I die before my kids achieve adulthood the same twist of wrongness could follow them. I’m not saying my childhood was awful or my mom did the ‘mommy dearest’ thing. No, relative to the stuff I’ve seen in the world, I did alright as a kid. What I didn’t have was a dad and that meant I never learned from anyone but myself and David Hasselhoff how to be a man.
The Hoff clearly led me astray.
Now I sit here connecting to a distinctly male history of sipping fine whiskey and through the taste connecting to a culture and even a gender that has never been entirely accepted me. I guess that is another revelation in itself: Acceptance has a value.