28 Days Later

As you know I have to lose 100 pounds before I go to Hawai’i at the end of next month.

To facilitate this I stopped drinking on January 1st. 28 Days Later I have lost 20 pounds and discovered real life horror.

To start, I need to bitch about my friends. I am partly fond of many of them some of the time, but I am not getting a whole lot of support on this non-drinking thing. My protests aside, I keep getting invited to and compelled to attend parties where they are all continuing to drink like it’s the end of the world or something. I guess they have a point as W’s legacy continues to wreak havoc on employment. I want to be all “no judgment” and “live and let live” about their continued alcohol abuse, but with my new found sobriety I have realized some truly disturbing things about my friends. They are oak addicts.

Yes oak. Vile, offensive, woody, oak.

Before I dive in on my oak rant I must give some context. Here is how drinking works:

• In your 20’s you switch from crap that you drank in college to good micro brews.
• At some point you realize that beer just fills you up and makes you sleepy and then you switch to wine.
• You start off drinking red wine because it seems grown up somehow.The bigger, heavier the red the better it must be because you can taste more, right?
  
• In your mid to late 30’s you flirt with cocktails because that seems sophisticated, but you are not in your 20’s anymore and it now takes 4 days to recover from a hangover.
• Around age 40 you are supposed to come to your senses and start drinking white wine like a grown up. Not all whites, no, but we will come back to that in a moment.
  

You should understand at your age that drinking red wine has many negative consequences:

• Your head fills up with snot and your eyes itch and turn bright red
• Acid reflux rips the lining of your esophagus causing internal bleeding
• Your teeth and tongue turn black

Yes, standing around drinking red wine at a party basically makes you look and act like a zombie in a movie, like, well, 28 Days Later.


So let me make this perfectly clear (like a glass of Orvieto), red wine is made to go with food. Red food. Dead red food. Dead cows, dead lambs, dead ducks. Perhaps a not quite dead ahi. Not that you can’t drink a perfectly lovely Albarino instead with all of these. In fact, given that the food stuffs identified above can all be quite lovely to eat I have to ask why you would even consider infecting them with something that tastes of tobacco, rubber, licorice, burnt barrel, and the vile oak.

Oak. No good can come of anything with oak in it.

• Oklahoma
• Oakland
• Okinawa

See.

Now, just to show that I am not prejudiced against the vile monstrous zombie like reds, I will readily admit that almost every American Chardonnay is an equally vile disgusting oak monster as well.

I am not suggesting, yet, that there be federal legislation imposed to stop making people drink this sludge, no. I think it should be left up to the states.

I am looking forward, 80 pounds from now, to rejoining the real joys of life:
Prosecco, Soave, Gavi, Orvieto, Trebbiano, Cava, Albarino, Verdejo.

And don’t even get me started on those French.