Monday, November 25, 2019

Writer's Tears

No, whiskey is not my favorite,
but I am partial to this name!

I asked Regen, one of the owners of our favorite neighborhood bistro ~ Town & Gown ~ if she and her husband Matt, who's from Ireland, carried this brand of whiskey in their bar. I told her that I was curious just because I liked the name of it, and she said:

"Me too! When the salesman first showed me this
product, I said 'Writer's Tears!' Sign me up!"

Haha! You can see why I like it there! They think like I do! I still haven't actually tried it though, so I have no idea how it tastes, but it might be good as a prop when reading an Irish novel!

Or an American novel:
Ordering drinks always floored me. I didn't know whisky from gin and never managed to get anything I really liked the taste of. Buddy Willard and the other college boys I knew were usually too poor to buy hard liquor or they scorned drinking altogether. It's amazing how many college boys don't drink or smoke. I seemed to know them all. The farthest Buddy Willard ever went was buying us a bottle of Dubonnet, which he only did because he was trying to prove he could be aesthetic in spite of being a medical student.

"I'll have a vodka," I said.

The man looked at me more closely. "With anything?"

"Just plain," I said. "I always have it plain."

I thought I might make a fool of myself by saying I'd have it with ice or gin or anything. I'd seen a vodka ad once, just a glass full of vodka standing in the middle of a snowdrift in a blue light, and the vodka looked clear and pure as water, so I thought having vodka plain must be all right. My dream was someday ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful. . . .

The drinks arrived, and mine looked clean and pure, just like the vodka ad. . . .

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallower's sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.
(10, 11, 12)

from The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
Or a short story:
"Anis del Toro. It's a drink."
"Could we try it?"
The man called "Listen" through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.
"Four reales."
"We want two Anis del Toro."
"With water?"
"Do you want it with water?"
"I don't know," the girl said. "Is it good with water?"
"It's all right."
"You want them with water?" asked the woman.
"Yes, with water."
"It tastes like licorice," the girl said and put the glass down.
"That's the way with everything."
"Yes," said the girl. "Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe."


from "Hills Like White Elephants"
by Ernest Hemingway
************

"You're a writer; you're supposed to be sad."


What, after all, is a writer's life without a dose of despair?
from Dear Committee Members (p 68)
by Julie Schumacher

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing
is destroying the quality of our suffering.”

Tom Waits

“I drank to drown my sorrows,
but the damned things learned how to swim.”

Frida Kahlo

Meme ~ The Scariest Halloween

The New Yorker ~ Ha

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