Notable and Potable Vol. 7: Choose Your Own Cocktail Adventure, Or Just Let The Ambien Decide
Lena Webb
Posted on May 20th, 2011
It is Saturday and your eyeballs are getting tacky from staring at the computer screen. You look outside and are disappointed to see all those active birds– shouldn’t it be dark yet? What have you done today, anyway? You made a tidier-looking pile of dirty laundry, you made a chocolate beet bundt cake that looks very professional but tastes like wet mulch, and now it’s heading towards the gloaming. You see a 10mg Ambien pill on your desk. You:
a) ignore the pill and get to work on that jigsaw puzzle
b) take the pill
You decide to take the pill. People typically take pills with some kind of liquid, and you have none. Looking around, you notice a liquor cabinet containing Hendricks, Kraken, some kind of local organic vodka, and many other bottles. A meek but educated-sounding voice inside you says “but alcohol may intensify any side effects!” You ignore the voice and reach for:
a) the Kraken
b) the Chartreuse
You pick up the bottle of Kraken by its little ear handles and decide the best and easiest option is a dark and stormy. You make the drink with soda and ginger liqueur instead of ginger beer, and top it off with a squeeze of lemon juice. With your tempestuous beverage in hand, you return to your desk and send the pill’s contents on its way to your neurons with an effervescent sip.
Still, that jigsaw puzzle isn’t going to put itself together. It’s an “I Love Lucy” jigsaw puzzle, and it isn’t even one of those thousand-piecers, so no matter how hard you try to find them, the excuses just don’t exist. You sit on the floor and and start separating edge pieces. After what seems like hours, you have a third of what you think is the left side border, and your straw is making snarky sounds from the bottom of your empty glass. You look up from your task and see:
a) the doorway to your bedroom
b) an empty glass in your hand
You don’t feel sleepy in the slightest; in fact, you’re feeling clever and intrepid, so you bring your empty glass back to the liquor cabinet. This time you go straight for the Chartreuse. You pour it neat on some ice. It’s made by monks. What kind of monks? Carthusian. Back at your desk, you end up reading every page on this website. You jot down a few important things on the envelope of a credit card offer and make a note to invent a cocktail called “Bruno’s Rapture.”
At this point the hypnotic sleep aid has taken hold and the alcohol has indeed intensified its side effects. You feel more than capable of spending day after Carthusian day working in contemplative silence to gather each and every one of the 130 plants that your taste buds are trying frantically to parse as you sip the medicinal green spirit. Moved to action by these intense flavors and thoughts, you:
a) check to see if the Carthusian monks have a Twitter account
b) put on some Dr. Octagon
c) try to make your own Chartreuse
They don’t, and with Dr. Octagon rapping through your headphones about the trials and tribulations of being a gynecologist from Jupiter, you don your bathrobe and head outside into the darkness, monk-style, to gather ingredients for your homemade Chartreuse. You don’t bring a flashlight “for religious reasons.”
“It’s morning, 7′ o clock, you at my clinic…” Dr. Octagon announces, and you wake up with a start. You are on the kitchen floor. As you stand up, leaf litter falls from your robe and you find an entire pine cone snarled up in your hair. The countertop is strewn with organic matter, and you feel like a severely hung over anthropologist as you pick through it all trying to find some meaning. You find what appears to be about five pine needle cigarettes hand-rolled in birch bark, one half burned. Your Hawthorne strainer has mulch in its coil, and you don’t dare look inside your shaker. You sit down on the floor again and notice a name tag reading “Hello my name is Carthusiastic B!” stuck to the bottom of your foot, and you begin to remember bits and pieces of the previous evening. Apparently that was your rapper name.
Back at your computer desk, you find a jar containing a handful of leaves and twigs floating in Chartreuse, some barely legible tasting notes, and the following recipe typed on the screen:
The Rapture of St. Bruno
It is important not to speak while making and drinking this cocktail because… monks. Gather, by moonlight or in complete darkness, ingredients. Nothing fashionable. Assemble a crucifix of sticks using vines (and twines) and muddle ingredients with its Power. Add Chartreuse and shake, shake with Awe. No ice. Strain into glass and add vodka to change the color a little bit. Rock wit it.
You:
a) take the jar out back and bury it
b) close the recipe without saving and go to bed