Cocktailing

I am often asked if you can tell a person by what they drink, and of course I can.

Rum and Coke? You're laid back and uncreative. You aren't worried about drinking caffeine and sugar until 2 a.m. and you don't care much for ambiance. You usually hang out with one other friend and you'd rather chill at the bar than shake your booty.
Tic Tac?(orange rum dropped into orange juice and red bull) You were born after 1986. You spend a considerable amount of time primping yourself before you leave the house and you always have an entourage. You never drink alone and you have one intention at the bar – to hook up.

There are few ways that you can attempt not to pay for your drinks. While the bartender has your attention, you can break your neighbor's highball so that she has to clean up ice cubes, slivers of glass, and spilled whiskey and seven. And while her head is turned, you can play Houdini and disappear. Or you can give her a bunk credit card to open a tab. Or you can wad up your money up so tight that it takes so much time to unfold it that when she is aware she has been shorted, you have gone awol. But if that she is me, I will find you and make you pay, Nothing makes me madder than someone trying to pull the wool over my eyes. I have pursued unpaid bar tabs to other bars, I have filed charges against people with stolen or fraudulent credit cards, and I have even hunted down two grown men to find them huddled blocks away in their tiny barren apartment to make them pay me for two Irish Car Bombs.

Halloween is the only day when one can comfortably enter a ritzy nightclub with chi's chi's hanging out of a prom dress made entirely out of Glad forceflex trash bags, old Christmas lights, and zip ties.
Halloween goers spend weeks creating and polishing the perfect costume. Creativity shines the weeks before Halloween. The craft stores are packed to the brim with people that somehow have the gumption create a Marie Antoinette costume from scratch even though they've never been able to thread a needle or use a glue gun. Each costume is meant to bedazzle the next and every nightspot has some sort of costume contest.

It's the time of year when going out involves more than two pieces of clothing and a pair of flip-flops. Jackets, hats, scarves, gloves, earmuffs, mittens, ear warmers, nose warmers and a myriad of other clutter is strewn about once everyone is gone from the bar and we turn the lights up. And of course, whoever is missing these abandoned items is positive someone stole them, and ninety-nine percent of the time whatever has been lost is really just on the floor getting danced on.
One night, a young man would not give up the notion that someone had certainly hijacked his beloved AC/DC sweatshirt that he shanghaied from his big brother in 1994. He bemoaned that his sweatshirt was his best friend and his identity; and he couldn't believe someone would take it. I too couldn't believe someone would take it, because I'm fairly sure there is not a hot second market for ratty, has-been band sweatshirts. And apparently there's not – as we soon found it right next to where he had been sitting all night.

Been on vacation lately and thought you were feeling so much better for the much-needed rest and relaxation? Or could it be you spent a week downing blended drinks where there's a heap of anti-depressants in the drinking water? Why cities are afraid to post results of what's mingling in their municipal water supply is a real shame, especially since almost half of bottled water is really tap water. Cities could be using this information to their advantage for a whole new genre of marketing. Wouldn't it be great to choose your water according to your needs and desires?
Feeling a little run down, choose water from a source that has high levels of anti-biotics in it. Sport teams looking for a leg up, they can have their training camps where trenabolic and other anabolic steroids mingle in the drinking water. The entire art of mixology could change – as you certainly can't add pharmaceuticals to people's drinks – but you can add water.

The beloved “Best Of” issue – everyone in the restaurant industry awaits it with an appetite. The rumors fly, the questions gnaw; who is going to get what this year? And then for one week, a year's worth of dedication and voters' fickleness is presented in grandeur, and it's the talk of the town for days until something more interesting comes into play – like whether we'll dredge Mirror Pond or if they'll ever finish resurfacing the parkway.
But should someone needed to know who the second best bartender in Bend is, well that's when I would blow off my fingernails, polish them on my shoulder, and proudly proclaim that I was the person they were seeking. Because, you might not know this, but for the life of me I cannot win that category. Cocktail show, cocktail classes, cocktail column, Las Vegas cocktail contest, radio promo, none of this is enough in today's highly competitive popularity contest.

Most children by the age of ten can recite a chilling version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” or another outlandish ghost tale. At summer camp they sit around late at night terrifying one another by raising the ante with each story. But the child who terrorizes like no other is always the child of an Oregon bartender. No other child has experienced the true-life horrors of the creature many simply refer to as OLCC. Stories of their pappies disappearing in the middle of the night because daddy's server permit was at home instead of tattooed on his upper right shoulder and tales of mommy turning into an evil mummy because she told someone over the telephone that her place had happy hour on Fridays.

There is never a void in cable television. You will find that be there ruinous fire, torrential flood, cataclysmic volcano, or category-five hurricane, you will still have access to 24-hour cable programming. Most of it tends to be awful as we have all watched at least an episode of something embarrassing, demoralizing and contemptible like The Swan where they found Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon to turn 300-pound losers into cougar-ready material for Real Housewives of Orange County. Or My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé in which a schoolteacher pretended to marry a rude, loathsome, and slobby hippopotamus for a cash prize. Unfortunately, what I’ve just described is wretched and is aired at prime time, so you can only imagine what I watch when I finally have time to ignite the boob tube at 4 a.m. I flip between infomercials with Tattoo selling personal massagers, discount telephone psychics and Suzanne Sommers doing kegel exercises with what appears to be pool noodle. I flip through hundreds of channels in determination of finding something somewhat satisfying. While I hate to admit it, I always stop at the ShamWow guy.

I, along with many, have experienced the worst of the worst this allergy season. One day I was frolicking about, allowing the sun to make my golden tresses blonder, my pale skin bronzier, and my deranged spirit lighter. And then, mysteriously, I couldn’t breathe. There was no doubt that a little hit of Advil Cold & Sinus would allow me to smile while telling people about the soup de jour.
Sniffling my way through the pill aisle, I found my beloved tablet wasn’t there. Assuming they were out-of-stock, I immediately ordered online only to find they couldn’t be shipped to Oregon. Thanks to this state’s abundance of meth producers, my only chance of not blowing snot bubbles while setting down someone’s tenderloin was blown.
In my college days, ephedrine was on every gas station counter-the bright blue and red Mini Thin label screaming out to, “Eat me, I’m so much fun with a margarita.” Or, “Eat twelve of me and you could write two term papers, take a ten-mile run, and scrub all your floors with a toothbrush and still feel fresh.

Following Michael Jackson’s recent death, even NPR is starting to sound like an ’80s pop station as “Beat It” or “Man in the Mirror” seemingly haunts the background of every other interview. As a child of the ’80s, my first introduction to star hysteria was Thriller; I would practice moonwalking and other jerky crotch-grabbing dance moves with my childhood girlfriends while donning legwarmers and a side ponytail.
The man needs a cocktail in honor of all he’s done, but which Michael do you base the drink on? Is it the African-American Wonder Boy, the White King of Pop, the Soul-Searching Humanitarian, the Amusement Park Pedophile or the Looks-Like-an-Alien Philanthropist? Or do you just base it on one of his song titles, like just create some vile concoction that figuratively screams “I’m Bad” when you taste it?