A Brief History of Drinking

Growing up I was never terrorized by overly-protective parents who preached a gospel of the evils of alcohol or drugs. Yes, they both gave me the little talk about how drugs are dangerous and how alcoholism is destructive and really just not cool, but they never sheltered me from the realities of the world, which was summed up by the very basic: Life can be fun and enjoyable and beautiful but for the most part it's rather boring and miserable so having a drink or two occasionally won't make you a bad person.

I think most people would find the liberal household I grew up in to be a little odd but that's what you get when your father was a motorcycle riding pot smoking hippie with a penchant for beer and your mother was a sort of hyper-intelligent pot smoking wanna-be hippie with a strong love for tequila.

I remember a trip to Fort Myers Beach Florida one year when I was about 5 (before my little sister was born) where we had the door to the hotel room open to let the nighttime sounds and smell of the beach crash through the place and my mom, dad and aunt were sitting in the little kitchenette drinking and laughing about something. My mom calls me over to get me to help make bloody marys, because I was such an enthusiastic helper. She handed me a bottle of V8, a small bottle of Jose Cuervo gold and some celery stalks and a pepper shaker. Then I learned how to make bloody marys. It was fun!

Memories of being 14 and doing freezer-cold shots of JC gold tequila with my mom on New Years Eve --
Me: "So how do you drink this stuff?"
Mama: "You pour it in a shot glass and just down it. Only wimps use salt and lemons. And really the best way to drink it is warm. But your dad put it in the freezer so we'll have to make do."
Me: "Alright."

At the time one shot was way more than enough for me and to be fair after I was born my mom really quit drinking as much as she did when she was a teenager. New Years Eve was the one time a year she had a drink and it was always tequila.

As it was, being raised in such an interesting family, I was never inclined to be rebellious. Apart from those few rare times I did a shot with my mom, or drank my first taste of gin with my best friend Kara at her house (which her Lutheran pastor mother gave us permission to do at the age of 15), I never had really any desire to drink.

Once I was legally able to buy alcohol I would occasionally buy a small bottle of Malibu rum or Smirnoff Raspberry vodka, but it'd take a few weeks to finish it and it was always mixed with diet coke or cranberry juice. I didn't really get into drinking until I was 23 and then I was still a straight-on-till-morning liquor drinker.

The first time I got drunk was when I was 22 (almost 23) and Jason came over to the house with a bottle of aforementioned raspberry vodka and a KMFDM concert dvd. We sat on my bed and took turns drinking small sips out of the bottle. Well Jason's a notoriously slow drinker and I'm so not, so within 30 minutes I had consumed nearly half the bottle by myself. Not being a seasoned drinker this led to nothing pleasant and the following day Jason joked at how he had never witnessed ANYONE go through every stage of inebriation as fast as I did that evening.


 Needless to say I never again drank Smirnoff Raspberry Vodka.

Never again. Ever.

 It was about a year later that I started getting into beer, thanks to Kara returning to SC from her stint in California. I hadn't seen her in like three years  and I was quite excited to have my best bud back in my life.

We started making bi-monthly trips to The Flying Saucer and at first I stuck to beers like Harp and Newcastle. My first beer love was Harp and even now I hold a little special place dear in my heart for it. Jason never passes up a chance to...harp...on how I used to tell him "Beer is so disgusting. It's only for boys."

My first (beer) love

 It took about a year but I really branched out into different styles; starting off with the simple easy to drink pale ales, lagers and pilsners, but then I discovered my true-love: IPAs.

The intensity and complex palate of a good Imperial Pale Ale really hit me hard and I fell deeply in love with beers such as Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Everyone else I know says they taste like one of the following oh-so-pleasant items: sawdust, tree sap, or juniper bushes. To each his own.

3 Gorgeous Pint Night Pints 

 

Joining the UFO club at The Flying Saucer pretty much demanded that I taste different types of beer and within a year and a half I had sampled 200 different kinds.

As the years have gone by, a 5 day stint in Belgium and a 6 day trip to England, I have really blossomed into a true beer snob. It pains me deeply when people say they only drink Bud Light and I absolutely cannot fathom drinking the same beer all night long.

Enjoyed in London near British Museum

Currently I realize that my tastes are branching out a lot more. Since the England trip I have become completely enamored with ales and this winter season I have discovered some of the best winter warmers I have ever had. Despite all the glorious Belgian beers that I hold so dear to my heart (St. Feullien Tripel, Maredsous 8, Duvel...just to name a few) I found my most favourite beer in the world last November: Highland Cold Mountain. It was by far the best beer I tasted during all of 2010 and I'm looking forward to my 2011 quest for the best beer of the year.

I would have this beer's babies.

Insanely good with apple pie.

 I have been working on moving into porters and this year I have already found one I really enjoy: Kona Coffee Porter, but still I'm hesitant to enjoy stouts. Maybe next year.

As an update: I am currently only 15 brews away from my second plate in the Ring of Honor at Flying Saucer. Quite an 'accomplishment' for a girl who only 5 years ago crinkled her nose in disgust at the thought of a beer.

You Have to Keep Things Clean

When you have a day off from work thanks to some random We Need to Be Politically Correct Holiday, nothing is better than cleaning up the house and cleansing your aural palate with some beautiful Tear Garden.

As a huge audiophile (really thanks in good part to my wonderful husband) I've discovered that there is a song for any mood, any activity, any day. Your brain stores these songs/albums in a flesh & blood iTunes folder in your mind and if you have a big enough library up there you are sure to find the perfect song for any occasion.

My problem is that I never remember song titles, not even to my most favourite songs, so my 'search engine' is a little wonky...kinda pre-google era. You know...like using a dictionary or encyclopedia. And the worst part is that when I most want a particular song is when I most certainly can never remember it.

Oh well.

Enjoy Tear Garden. And remember...you've got to keep things clean!

Friant, Found

Having a day free from work usually allows me to do nothing but laze about on the couch watching silly sci-fi movies I've seen a thousand times. However this morning I randomly stumbled upon a 'new' artist,
Emile Friant.

I won't go into analyzing his work..I could ramble on for hours about how gorgeous the brushwork is and how some of it, particularly the works that contain a singular figure are so hauntingly photographic it just baffles that the rest of the image is slurry and faded out. See? I can't help myself.

Yet I will say that he's a brilliant blend of all the qualities I love about Waterhouse, Sargent and Cabanel. I'm surprised I've never heard of this guy because he was a supreme talent and I have a serious soft spot for the French Realist painters. Actually a soft-spot is being mild...I have an undying burning obsessive lusting passion for the French Realist movement. I will definitely be on the hunt for his work in my future travels.

I will leave you with some of his goodies...

"Jeune Nancienne dans un paysage de neige" 1887

 "La petite barque"

 "The Expiation"

"Voyage a l'Infini" 1899 

"Cast Shadows"

 

"La Bande a Galle"

Autoportrait

Muse Fuel

Quite often, as is the case with any artist, the muse disappears. For long stretches of time. Long, maddening, painful stretches of time. But then a small spark of something: a change in the weather, a song you haven't heard in ages, a good turn of phrase from a friend or in a book...it will reignite the passions and feed that starving little muse that vanished into a dark corner of your being.

When the well is dry for so long, you learn to live with it, or forget about it. You can't remember the last time you were creative, the last time you put your heart into something beautiful or wonderous. Then it's much like a long-overdue wild fire and it rushes through you, burning away all the dead broken mess inside your head so new things can grow, push up through the ashes.

I've noticed my muse tends to prefer colder weather. I look back on stories and poems I've written and see that the majority of them were created during the fall/winter months. The current scientific theory about depression and lack of productivity during the darker months of the year (a mood disorder called SAD: seasonal affective disorder) doesn't seem to apply here.

My mind must swell under the humid oppressive heat of a South Carolina spring/summer and once the chill hits the air, it is free to expand.

The nighttime sky is vividly clear: each and every star, planet, galaxy is put into crisp nuclear perspective and on a freezing November night, when the moon is too small to matter, you can see into infinity. And the muse revels in the chaos.

So she returns. Nice to see you again, lady.

--Manda
11/14/10

Day Five: 7/29/10

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

London Calling.

Today we had an agenda: get to London as early as we can and do as much as we can before we die from exhaustion. Well the last part nearly happened but I’ll get to that shortly.

Ate breakfast as quickly as possible then scurried to the train station, where, because of long lines we missed the first train to London Bridge station by 10 seconds! Had to wait another 30minutes before the next one arrived then it was a nearly two hour ride to London. I had bought a paper to pass the time and had fun reading all the strange little bits thrown in with the real news.

When we finally get there we made our way, with relative ease, to London Bridge. Took pictures of ourselves with the Tower Bridge off in the distance, took same pic for a cute asian girl, then we headed on down to The Tower. Very cool and yet not at all what I expected.

It’s not really a ’tower’. It’s a complex of buildings, all built/rebuilt in different times and all serving different purposes, none of them originally meant for prisoners or torture. Part of it was actually a palace at one time and another part (The Bloody Tower) was home to Sir Walter Raleigh and his family. Apparently it’s also the place where the two little princes were supposedly murdered but they don’t really know so it’s just legend. 

Then we stood in line to see the Crown Jewels. It was a serious queue but it didn’t take long. The English certainly know how to move a line along! We got to see almost all the royal crowns since the 1660s, along with the scepters, orbs and rings the monarchs wore during coronation. I was really interested in seeing the Koh-I-noor diamond. The history of it is amazing and the superstitions that surround it make it even more cool.

After that we headed on over to Tower Green so we could be in the area where so many super historically famous figures were executed. It was really kind of creepy and sad at the same time to see a site where such intense drama and history played out, all sanitized and harmless looking. We also ventured into the small church who’s crypt houses the bones of all those executed, including Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Catherine Howard and Thomas Cromwell. It was really surreal.

So after that cheery bit we decided to pop into the small area where they show medieval torture devices and then we found the tower (Bell Tower) where supposedly Thomas More spent his remaining days before he had his head chopped off. The Tower of London was such a gruesomely intriguing place to go!

After The Tower, we made our way across Tower Bridge, taking lots of pics and looking for the The Globe Theatre. We found it, but it turns out they actually use it for productions and it’s really not the original thing (obviously), but just the original site. Then we went looking for the Tate Modern but not before we had some fish and chips from a pub/restaurant near The Globe. It was a little bit more fancy than the other pubs we went to and much bigger, but the fish and chips were EXACTLY like the kind I used to get with my grandmother in Triangle City. Yeah. In SC. I got a little nostalgic but we washed that away with the best Hoegaarden I’ve had since Belgium and a Leffe.

Then we found the Tate Modern and enjoyed all the goodies they had to offer. Jason was in his element, getting all Stendhal Syndrome over some de Chirico and Dali and Pollock. Then I found the Rothko and cried. It was glorious.

They don’t really have that much there, but what they do have is brilliant. Mondrian, Monet, Pollock, Dali, Bacon, Tanguy, Ernst and Lichtenstein. We got loads of funny pics.

After that we got seriously lost looking for the street in Soho that had all the record shops on it. I was SO NOT digging all the walking. I felt like my feet were going to explode. All I could think of while I was walking was ‘this is how it must felt to be marched as a slave with an invading army hundreds of years ago’ or “now I know how Sam and Frodo felt going to Mt. Doom.” Not happy Manda there. We failed with the Tube and then got irritated and pissy being dehydrated and tired, only managing to find one record shop only ten minutes before they closed.

We had to leave with only a few things and could not have been happier to get back to the B&B. We were STARVING cause we missed eating in London and didn’t get back to Canterbury until after 11 when all the bars were closing. So we ended up getting chicken kebab at a late night eatery run by Turkish guys. It was so delicious, but that may have been because we were dying from hunger and thirst and exhaustion. Who knows.

After that we were dead to the world, though I managed to somehow get a second wind and blog a little, get on Facebook for a few minutes and didn’t end up going to sleep until 1:30am. That was a LONG effing day!

Day Four: 7/28/10 Wednesday

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

So today was our photoshoot. We knew we needed to be ready for pictures at 3pm so we got up early, had breakfast downstairs, then headed back to Dover to tackle the White Cliffs.

It was pretty darn warm, probably the warmest day we’ve had here so far and let me tell you, climbing the White Cliffs of Dover is NOT a pleasure hike. I won’t go into all the huffing and puffing, name-calling and whining that Ms. Amanda did (as Jason says) but really I don’t see how the old people were doing it. There were tons of really elderly people just ambling about, not a bead of sweat or look of exhaustion. Guess we’re just fat lazy Americans or something. Anyway…We walked and climbed and scrambled for nearly three hours. But once you’re up there all the pain and drama is worth it. Oh brother is it worth it. The pictures we took only get a portion of the beauty.

And besides traveling to Dover to see the White Cliffs for a purely historical or ecological reason, we went up there to create a memory: we found a little spot, overlooking the water, with towering cliffs before us and we exchanged our vows and wedding bands and became (as far as we’re concerned) a married couple. We were technically already legally married, having signed the marriage license on 7/20, but it wasn’t real until we did that.

It was sappy and silly and I cried a little. But we’ll never forget it.

*

Well after all that, we had to hurry back ’home’ and get ready for our photo shoot. I got ready in amazing record time and we had to walk about two blocks down the street, in full wedding regalia, to the bewildered looks of drivers and passerbys and whistles from some guys in a work van, so we could meet our photographer in the Westgate Gardens. His name is Russ and he specializes in these amazing high fashion, movie-esque style shots, which both Jason and I really dig.
We did a good 45minutes in the gardens, making use of the gorgeous river and crazy graffiti under the underpass near the rear of the gardens. Then Russ and his friend/assistant Dragon (seriously his real name apparently) drove us out about 10minutes outside of Canterbury to an abandoned farm/machine yard. We got some wicked shots, what with all the rusted metal, broken glass, cracked machines and the glorious field of rape right next to it.

It was very fun and I seriously enjoyed it. Jason took a while to warm up, but he did better than I thought he would. Such a good sport!

Anyway, that was it for that day. We came back and got drunk off our asses at The Unicorn, after we enjoyed sea bass fish cakes and apple wood smoked ham with chips. Lots of Crabbies Ginger Beer. Oh yes! Then we passed out in the comfort of our down-filled bed. Huzzah to wedding day!

Day Three: 7/27/10 Tuesday

Tuesday July 27th, 2010

Well no photo shoot today. We woke up and sort of lounged around thinking we’d have the day for the shoot but ended up FINALLY getting ahold of our photographer who admitted he’d forgotten to change our date. So we’ll be doing the pictures tomorrow. That’s fine but it sort of shifted our schedule.

Nonetheless after wandering around Canterbury again, looking for the ruins of the St. Augustine Abbey, we came back, talked to Russ on the phone and then made our way to Dover.

We wanted to do the cliffs but couldn’t’ figure out how to get there, however we did do the Roman Painted house and the Dover Castle.

First the House:

Very quaint. Quiet, nobody in there. Nice old lady at the front desk who thought we didn’t speak English. I suppose that’s a plus but then again maybe it’s bad. Who knows.

The Roman Painted House is this fairly mid-sized, with the archaelogical ruins in the middle of the building. It was really cool. The painted walls are amazingly intact for a building that was made over 2000 years ago and the Roman fort wall that was left intact is really impressive. There was a lot of good info about the original dig and the stuff they found. We were actually able to touch the stuff but no pictures. So we bought the tour guide. I loved being able to put my hands on something that ancient people, Roman soldiers! may have touched.

Then we made our ungodly trek up the hills of Dover to the Castle. Oh my fucking god that was a harsh walk. Seriously the castle is located at about a million miles above sea level so it was entirely up hill. I mean we could have taken a bus but apparently we’re too cool for that so we walked it. Oh brother.

Nonetheless. Once we got up there, we did a mini-tour of the Wartime Tunnels, had a traditional English Tea Time, with scones, clotted cream, strawberry jam and Early Grey tea and then we hiked some more up the to the Castle proper. It was amazing. We took a load of pictures, found some weird hidey-holes in the Great Tower and I pretended to be back in medieval England. Grand time there.

After that we made our way back ‘home’ and decided that it was a damn shame that we hadn’t had a SINGLE pint since we woke up. Well we made up for that. Dinner at the Marlowe Café with a Tiger and a Kronenburg. Then it was off to the Café Belge where we got some proper beer. A Duvel and a Westmalle Triple. The poor waitress was apparently alone so she was sort of pissed that we only wanted beer (I mean isn’t the fact that we weren’t ordering food a plus, right?) but she made up for it by giving us free glasses of Bush Zalides(?) a 12% ale that tasted like pineapples.

Harsh harsh buzz there, I was so drunk it hurt. Had to come back to the B&B to take contacts out and put on glasses so I could see to walk down the street. Made it back to The Unicorn and had a helluva lotta beer. Found my favourite English beer so far, Crabbies, an alcoholic ginger beer. We sat outside in the beer garden and talked about our hereditary awesomeness and accents and then we stumbled back to have a nightcap at the B&B. Jason got a Spitfire and I got a Henney’s, an English cider that tasted just like a green apple jolly rancher.

Today was pretty vanilla in sightseeing terms, but we hardcored the tourist aspect of the day with all the pictures we took.

Tomorrow will be our ‘slow’ day, what with the wedding pictures and all, but it should still be fairly exciting.

Catch you later!