Some of the people all of the time

The Kaiser called me last Saturday. He’d been out with his lady on Friday night, and they’d gone to some new trendy bar. The reason he was calling, he told me, was that he’d been drinking absinthe there . He swore it was absinthe. Lucid, he told me, was the brand. I had a hard time believing him, as I happen to know that the absinthe importation ban is still in effect. I went to their website, and it looked like the real deal. For a moment, I got a little excited. But just as things too good to be true tend to be, this was. It turns out that in October of 2007, the Department of the Treasury’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau revised its policy regarding the use of the term “absinthe” on labels of distilled spirits products and in related advertising material:

We approve the use of the term “absinthe” on the label of a distilled spirits product and in related advertisements only if the product is “thujone-free” pursuant to the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) regulation at 21 CFR 172.510. Based upon the level of detection of FDA's prescribed method for testing for the presence of thujone, TTB considers a product to be “thujone-free” if it contains less than 10 parts per million of thujone.

In other words, Lucid can be legally sold in the States since it contains less than 10 ppm of the stuff that makes absinthe a good time. It’s as if the government clarified the definition of “marijuana” to allow the sale of THC-free products, and I marketed non-filtered Lucky Strikes under the name “420,” and claimed they were cannabis because each cigarette contained a hemp seed. What a gyp. Pernod has been around forever, and tastes exactly as a good absinthe should. To hell with Lucid.

Incidentally, Samantha went on a vacation to Prague with her brother and his wife last month. She was able to smuggle me back a bottle of Czech absinthe. I’ve mentioned before that Czech absinthe tastes horrible. I can only liken it to drinking Windex, but it definitely has the thujone kick. I’ve always preferred Spanish absinthe, but when you’re looking to get drunk, Old Milwaukee is better than water, right? I’d run out of absinthe during my first Ubermom rendezvous, so now my supply is restocked.

Vice Report

The market for vodka is pretty much over-saturated at this point. Seems like three-quarters of any given bar these days is vodka-based. My two favorites: Ketel One for the mixed drinks and Grey Goose on the rocks. Sometimes I end up with strange and interesting vodkas in the liquor cabinet, though, and it’s rare that I find one that I don’t like. I’d been holding on to an unopened bottle of Estonian vodka for a couple of years now: Türi. I’d had it as part of a “Soviet Union” flight of vodkas at Red Square in the Mandalay Bay back in 2005, and had bought a bottle shortly after getting back from that trip, but hadn’t opened it since then. I remembered it being pretty good, and the bottle looked cool in the liquor cabinet. I had a couple of folks over last night, and ran out of Ketel. I decided there was no time like the present to open the bottle of Türi, and let me tell you, folks, it was a wallop of disappointment. It had some real “burn” to it, and smelled like rubbing alcohol. I had poured myself a rocks glass half full of the stuff, and had to cut it with soda just to finish it off. Life’s too short to drink bad vodka, so I’m off to Costco to buy another bottle of Ketel One today.

fly on the sitemeter wall

Somebody in Atlanta, Georgia must have been horribly disappointed when their Google search for "big dick fever" led them to this entry here at Mad Shoeshiner.

Life is very long.

Upon hearing of my Friday night ignominy (blogged at length at Frankie’s place), Meno made me feel better with the following words:

“The way I see it, sooner or later everyone’s the grenade at sometime in their life.”

Greatest Misses - 2007

I was just reading through my entries from the past month or so, and realized that my life’s been pretty uneventful lately. Peter Piper Pizza? A story about my parents? Beef stew and Brylcreem? Reading Frankie’s first entry made me nostalgic for the days when I couldn’t blog fast enough to keep up with our stories. The majority of them remain in the ether, and eventually I’ll get to telling them, but there are no current “good” stories being generated. After Frankie’s waitress experience and my ubersaga, we both sort of self-imposed celibacy on ourselves to gather our thoughts. So I haven’t woken up next to a crazy chick since early October. I was going to put one of those “sobriety counter” widgets up here, but instead of sobriety, it would count days of chastity, but I think in the long run that would be depressing if I were to hit a real dry spell. Instead, I’ve spent the last month in introspection. When all is said and done, all I really want is a woman who’s faithful and kind at suppertime. Who would think that’s so hard to find?

I was at the mall on Sunday, killing time before a movie, and I ran into the girl from my very first entry. She was friendly and we chatted. She’s cute, and fun, but she shot me down at a time when rejection hurt more than usual. Whatever. I recalled the Milan Kundera line: “Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory,” and I wondered what happens at the point when a woman receives a blog entry dedicated to her? And I thought about the “misses” of 2007. I was sure, after the breakup, that I would find someone else, and when I applied myself, it wasn’t really that hard to find a warm body. But there were a number of women that I thought of as “good leads” in that I really did find them cool, and could have seen myself dating for a while, if only to see where the pursuit took me, but for various reasons, things did not pan out. In no real order, Jack Gordon’s Five Greatest Misses – 2007:

1. Allie Roth – An attractive, successful divorcee who also happens to have dated my friend Dan seriously, and Frankie not so seriously, along with a couple of acquaintances of mine. One Sunday I ran into her at the local mall and she invited me to join her at a wine bar across the street. That was around 2:00 in the afternoon, and we drank and talked and ended up at a sushi bar for dinner around 7:30. We made out first at the sushi bar, then in her Acura like adolescents. I didn’t try to take it any further assuming that there would be a second “date.” There wasn’t.
   ...
2. Sandy Quinn – A stunning flight attendant, with whom I had a series of long phone conversations that were smooth and enjoyable. I had high hopes until we went on our first date and I learned that (a) she was an evangelical born-again Christian who had just gotten back from a three day Christian rock festival; and (b) she did not consume alcohol. I can’t handle bible thumpers or teetotalers. I suspect that “functioning alcoholic papist” was not high on the list of what she was looking for, either.
   ...
3. The headshop girl – Weird choice, I know, but I was really, really drawn to her. I can’t imagine what we’d have had in common, but she just made me happy for the 20 minutes or so that we spoke. She was clearly more of a realist than I.
   ...
4. Teresa Lindstrom – I was in Baltimore for a conference, and we met first at a happy hour following the conference, then ran into each other later in the hotel bar. We had an awesome conversation, and I thought she was beautiful. My line on her was “I have a lot of Neil Young on my iPod, if you want to come up and listen to it.” She did. I knew things would never work out with us due to the distance between us, and that, more than anything, made my heart ache the next day.
   ...
5. The neo-pagan elf – When you expect nothing, and you get something, that’s destiny. When that something disappears as easy as it came, well, that’s just God having a sense of humor. My buddy Jason makes amateur films as a hobby, and he was picking up some props from one of his actresses at a bar across the street from where I work. He called and invited me to join in a drink, and I ended up hitting it off with the actress. She is a sculptor by trade, but an aspiring actress/writer the remainder of the time. We closed down the bar, and then relocated to a local resort designed by one of her favorite architects. We fooled around on the resort lawn like teenagers. We made plans to go on an actual date that coming Saturday. Saturday morning I called her and went straight to voicemail. I got a text from her later that day saying “sorry jack i am not interested in u in that way. i am in love with someone.” So it goes.

And so, like Gatsby, I beat on, boat against the current . . . or better yet, like Sam from Quantum Leap, I find myself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that my next leap . . . will be the leap home.

Paging Tyler Durden . . .

I'm typing this as I sit in my room at a Sleep Inn in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Business, not pleasure, in case you were wondering. Posting will be light this week due to my unfortunate situation. Just had some ribs for dinner at the Chili's across the street. It was one of those travel days -- got stuck at DFW Airport for four hours because American decided to cancel my flight from there to here without advanced notice. Then when I got here, it turns out I made reservations via Hertz for a car in Fayetteville, North Carolina, not Fayetteville Arkansas, and every motherfucking last rental shop in town was closed or out of cars. This isn't exactly a pedestrian town. Got a smoker's room, and it smells like the Pub used to before they made smoking in bars illegal. I may have to wrap up the few loose ends I have for work, and head back to the Chili's about 9:00 to drink away the boredom. Or maybe I'll just go to sleep early.

Something I remember pondering one year ago

Here's a pearl for you, dear reader:

The dog that chases two rabbits will catch neither.

A morning of disappointment

Bringing an end to a promising evening turned mediocre, I stayed out way too late last night, and consequently overslept this morning, and missed mass, which gave me a good dose of the old Catholic guilt as I greeted the day. Hungover, and conscious of the fact that I needed to be at work by noon (on a Sunday, no less), I showered, and while getting ready, I developed a fierce craving for a pork chop. . . and eggs . . . with some hash-browns and white toast. That would set me straight for the day; I knew it.

I could think of only one place where I could get a pork chop: fucking IHOP. I hate IHOP and have pretty much boycotted it for the past five years or so since (a) they don't carry Heinz 57 sauce; (b) they count both hash-browns and toast as a side, so you're forced to order one or the other in addition to your breakfast; and (c) they have shit on their menu that sounds so silly (Rooty Tooty Fresh & Fruity Breakfast, anyone?), that I hate them on general principle. But they were always good for a pork chop and egg breakfast, even if they didn't have Heinz 57 to eat the pork chop with. So I went there this morning, and had to wait for twenty minutes while apparently all the huddled masses and their unwashed children waited for a table along with me. And then, I finally sit down, and I order some coffee, and I'm ready to order AND THEY DON'T HAVE PORK CHOPS AND EGGS ON THE FUCKING MENU ANYMORE, AND DON'T SERVE IT AS A BREAKFAST SELECTION! Talk about a real downer. I had to settle for a chicken-fried steak and eggs, which was quite inferior, and if that's what I had wanted for breakfast, I wouldn't have gone to IHOP. The waitress, Wendy, was very nice and understanding. She gave me Friday's USA Today to read while I waited for my meal. . . . I left and drove straight to the office from there, and the hits just keep on rolling.