The Power of Positive Drinking

Some people ruin their drinks with ice,
and then they ask me for advice.
They say, “I’ve never told this to anyone else before.”
— Lou Reed, The Power of Positive Drinking

I was thinking of that line even before Brian mentioned not putting ice in his beloved Lagavulin. It’s a sad day that that even needs to be said. Ice. pff.

Holy Crap! Sweet Jane just came on the TV radio station. It’s a cover, but it still counts as a plate of shrimp. It’s a good cover. Oh, man I feel good right now. I was feeling pretty good before, but then with head-slap thunder the chama monsoon rain started coming down just as the second beer was finding my nervous system. Late in the season for a monsoon, especially considering the dry August, but just what the doctor ordered for heart and land. And the smell, the smell. Ozone and soft mud. More thunder, punctuating Buffalo Springfield.

The temperature has dropped a few degrees: It’s whiskey time now. On each side of me a dog lies twitching, running with the wolves they’ve never learned they’re not.

I’m trying not to resent the arrival of the family later this afternoon. It’s their house, after all. They paid for it and everything. The only thing is, I have put the Jerry vibe into this place the last few days, and it’s just now building up to critical mass. I feel the vibe most intensely right now. It is a calm feeling despite the loud music. (Next time I get up I’m going to turn down the bass just a wee bit, bringing the vibe incrementally closer to perfection.) My quiet madness reaches out across the Chama Valley and reflects back to me off the far Brazos Peaks, rolling with the distant thunder, dancing with lightning, and I know the storm is here for me. I have called it from the place where storms sleep, roused it for one last grumbly dance across the land.

The thirsty land feels my energy, and amplifies it. The rich mud hosts tiny creatures fleeting across brief puddles, in a madcap accelerated cycle of life. Water! Grow! Sex! Die! In this frantic call to life I am unnoticed, but something rises from the muck that I smell and understand. Some bugs are getting laid tonight.

Ooo! Look! A can of mixed nuts, sitting right here next to me! Truly the Universe is resonating with me today, responding to my needs even before I know them myself.

My vibe, apparently, is a fragile one. Bringing other personalities too close to it pains it. In a bar, I can create a vibesphere, and close myself in my own aura for a few precious hours, but in a house with other people around the bubble shatters into tiny red fragments, needle-sharp little brain jammers. Better not to even try to bubbleize in the first place.

But for now I sit, pupflanked, Scotch Guarded, open, resonating. Feeling the power.

16 thoughts on “The Power of Positive Drinking

  1. Poetry in motion. I read this to Tom, and he said I almost perfectly captured your voice. I could almost smell the storm. That must be why its hard for my to criticize your work. I can almost hear your voice in my head, telling me the story.

    Sometimes its magic Jerry. Then the humor comes crashing in. I’m read for another installment of Chandler’esque hard-boiled detective fiction. Talk to me baby….

  2. Ah, the smell of a thunderstorm in the mountains — it’s got to be one of the best smells ever. It’s especially hugely welcome in a time of drought. Throw all the windows open. Let it in. Who cares about the carpet?

    For as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved rainy nights and the smell of rain. As a small child, I was terrified of many things, such as stairs and loud noises (and anything I didn’t trust, I’d set my fearless brother up to test), but I was never scared of thunderstorms.

  3. AH, one of the things I am looking forward to when I get back (looks like it’ll be about the 14th), so don’t use ’em all up just yet! Save a couple for later in September! I used to love sitting in the green house during nighttime storms, windows open, smells and rain mixing in the breeze, sudden flashed of intense full moonlight, quickly followed by that crash and rumbling. AH, those were the daze…

  4. Hey, I was trying to put a link to the SSDC, but it was hard to find, and it looks like the comments are all gone. I think the squirrels are trying to, not necessarily censor, but erase our memories of their activities. Be careful out in the woods there. Carol Anne had reported strange squirrel activity out there. Have the boys started to collect nuts or anything strange? Just be careful…

  5. The link is http://homepage.mac.com/vikingjs/iblog/C1449835033/E37399733/index.html

    It’s funny about the comments: it says there aren’t any but when you click the link there they are. I’m not sure how to fix that. I suspect it’s out of my hands. I’ll try adding a comment and see what happens.

    I found a free search service I’ll be adding to the blog soon to help people find the old classics. I wanted to put in a ratings system so I could feature the highest-rated episodes in the sidebar, but the only ones I’ve found are integrated with commenting systems and switching over would lead to the loss of more than 1500 existing comments.

    I’m considering writing one myself, might be a good business opportunity, but right now I’m just too busy.

  6. Something that’s been happening to me a whole lot, not just on this blog but also on at least three others, is weird glitches like the comment counter not indicating any comments. Sometimes none of those links at the bottom of the entry show up at all in the window, just the vertical line that’s supposed to separate them; sometimes I get time-out errors; sometimes things just hang. I’ve discovered refreshing the page usually restores the comment counter/links. For time-out errors, I go and click on something else and come back.

    This isn’t restricted to dialup connections either — it happens to me at work, where there’s a T1 line.

    I figure it’s a problem with the system.

  7. If the service doesn’t respond within a certain time, the browser gives up on it. I find it more common with a slower connection speed, but it can happen at any speed. Haloscan has trouble more often than Sitemeter.

  8. If so, they’re still doing it. I’m getting more time-out problems than ever before. On average, it’s taking me three reloads of every window. At this rate, I may give up.

  9. You may be able to adjust your browser’s time-out time or reduce the number of simultaneous connections to improve download reliability.

  10. Ooh, what a contrast. You finish your entry with

    Neat poetry, among other things.

    and you end up with

    Dr. Jekyll, meet Mr. Hyde.

    Yeah, I know, I’ll be looking at the time-out time and stuff like that. Just interesting how the voice changes. Mine does too.

  11. Now this is weird. I included quoted material in that previous entry, and said quoted material disappeared. I’m resending, with, I hope, the quoted material included.

    Ooh, what a contrast. You finish your entry with

    But for now I sit, pupflanked, Scotch Guarded, open, resonating. Feeling the power.

    Neat poetry, among other things.

    and you end up with

    You may be able to adjust your browser’s time-out time or reduce the number of simultaneous connections to improve download reliability.

    Dr. Jekyll, meet Mr. Hyde.

    Yeah, I know, I’ll be looking at the time-out time and stuff like that. Just interesting how the voice changes. Mine does too.

  12. Yeah, I have to say that this is one of my favorite episodes of late. Sometimes you can say pupflanked and sometimes you can’t.

    Right now, as I sip my tea and shake off the foggy sleepies all I can do is recommend you try the blockquote tag next time and see if that works better than quotation marks. ‘If you can read this, single quotes work as well.’

  13. Minor gloat point: Thanks to what I’ve learned on this blog, I’ve befuddled my colleagues. TVI has a new and, for the most part, nifty web-communication-information-whatever system. One of the complaints faculty members have had about the system is that it doesn’t allow users to enhance text with embellishments such as boldface and italics. But I can do them! It’s fun to be asked “How do you do that?”

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