You all know the feeling - a bottle of liquor, whether the choice was sweated over, or your typical brand was casually nabbed from your local bottle shop - sits on your shelf calling to you. No, it's not saying your name in a frenzied attempt to draw you deeper into the sad world of alcoholism, it's just looking at you.
It's daring you, challenging you not to disappoint. It is giving you a once over to see if you have what it takes to put up a real fight. In the end, we all know if you go head to head with a bottle of booze, it takes at least as much from you as you take from it (I said this about martinis last week, and I repeat it again). Instead, it works much better to sidle along, slinking from one glass to the next, offering a friend an ounce or two in between cups, perhaps quietly downing a shot in an obscure hour when there is no one to watch.
Once you have outwitted the noxious beast, it becomes less a test of wills, and more a defining of the inevitable. As you turn the bottle up for its final pour, there is a blend of satisfaction and disapproval. If only you'd sprung for the bigger bottle, the harder stuff, more of it, maybe the challenge would have been harder. Yet at the same time, you have accomplished what you set out to do when you bought it. With grim, if unsteady motions, you can put the bottle down and forget all about it now. You are left as you were, with nothing more or less than yourself. I just hope the guy at the bottom of the bottle has a healthy glow about his cheeks!
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