ince I hardly drink, and Malaya drinks even less than I do, this page isn't likely to be updated that often. Yet when it is, you can expect a relatively weird story, since we drink so seldom that there's a great novelty aspect to it when we do.

• Also see the wine-tasting article page for somewhat similar tales.

More recent updates are added on top of this page.

January 30, 2004

The candy canes were an even bigger discount, but were entirely unplanned.  We were in Longs Drugstore a few days ago printing out some photos from the digicam (Use the automated machine and pay 45 cents each; pretty cheap.) and looking around before we left we saw a small selection of left over Xmas stuff at close out prices.  Chief among them were boxes and boxes of candy canes, 18 per box.  Those sold for around $2 a month ago, but now?  Ten cents.  Yes a dime.  That's essentially free, in my opinion, so I got five boxes for some change in my pocket, and carried them out, feeling like the most Christmasy elf ever.

Four boxes of peppermint, and one of the mysterious and exotic green spearmint flavor.  I soon found out why they're mysterious and exotic... it's because they aren't any good.

The other problem is that a grown adult human can eat maybe one candy cane a day, and you're pushing your luck to maintain that pace for more than a week or so.  I've had about 4 of them in the 2 or 3 weeks since we got the boxes, and that includes the one spearmint flavored one that I consumed about 1/10th of before throwing in the trash. So we've got one package of the peppermint ones out now, with a rubber band wrapped around them below the curved necks. It makes a neat, umbrella-like shape with a dozen of them all pointing outwards.  And four boxes on the top shelf in the closet; the spearmint box having a small opening in the plastic cover and two empty slots inside.

Why two gone, when I just ate part of one and threw it out?

Do it yourself Goldschlager!  Minus the gold flakes, which can't be tasted anyway.

Malaya has a big jug filled with moonshine, sent here from a friend of hers in the Philippines.  We've had shots from it a few times, but never more than one or two at a time, since it's very strong, and doesn't taste any good. It's definitely alcohol of the "drink it to get drunk" style, and since we hardly ever want that, it's mostly a conversation piece. It was utilized during our one, long ago, legendary night of drunken Scrabble. It's coconut vodka, and smells like rocket fuel.  The taste is probably similar, though I've never actually consumed rocket propellant.

Anyway, the original coconut vodka was very strong, very rough, and clear. Like paint thinner. After our first time drinking it, we decided that it could use some more/other flavor, and started dissolving Jolly Rancher candies in it.  Mostly red ones, to give it a better hue.  They dissolved very quickly, almost frighteningly quickly.  It was reminiscent of the old poisoner joke where the spoon used to stir the stuff in turns black and shrivels up as quickly as it's stirred around.

We went on dropping the occasional cherry or watermelon Jolly Rancher in for some months, without ever doing anything more than smelling the vodka to check the changes wrought upon it. After a dozen or more candies were gone, and we had some (pre post-xmas bonus buy) candy canes lying around, it occurred to me that we could/should dissolve one (or more) of those in the vodka to see how that went.  So we did, and it was pretty nifty.

At first we hung the candy cane over the lip, with the lower portion of it submerged, but that part was dissolved away fairly quickly, leaving the rest of it hanging above, like the pilings on a rotting pier.  So we broke off the hooked part and dropped the rest of it into the liquor, where it sunk like a mobster into the East River.  Unlike the East River, our bottle of vodka has a clear bottom, and through it we could see the stricken candy cane segments lying amidst the other partially-dissolved sediment, their sugary exteriors rapidly dissolving away to nothing.

This was repeated several times before Xmas, and since then we've added another couple of candy canes from the post-xmas "almost free" sale, including one spearmint one.  All dissolved quickly, and are entirely gone now, but their essence remains, turning the formerly bitter vodka into a much sweeter, peppermint-scented party drink.

Well, I wouldn't go that far, but it does smell quite a bit like Goldschlager, which is why I linked to it above.  It even tastes a bit like it, and while it's far too harsh for comfortable sipping, you no longer feel like you must swallow it quickly before your tongue is permanently withered by the liquid.

So I'm bringing this up to let you know that 1) candy canes can be purchased in bulk for almost free in the days shortly after Xmas, and 2) you can turn very cheap, very potent rot gut vodka, or gin, or other nefarious clear liquors into something that's far tastier, or that at least smells better, by adding half a dozen candy canes.  I'm not really recommending this, I mean if you're going to drink and you don't drink that often, drop the $28 on a bottle of good stuff, like Goldschlager, for instance.  But if you happen to have a bottle of something clear, alcoholic, and barely tolerable, try dissolving some peppermints or other hard candies into it.  The taste and odor will probably be greatly improved, and if not it certainly won't be any worse than it was to begin with.

And come to think of it, I might as well go drop another couple of candy canes into the vodka now.  Can't hurt, and the stuff might become sippable yet.

Not that either Malaya or myself are likely to ever sip it, since neither of us drinks other than a sip of wine from time to time, or to get out and out drunk, and that's only happened once in the 7 months I've been here.

Yes, we're quite the life of the party.

June 18, 2003

Neither Malaya or I drink much.  I'll have some wine once in a while, usually when I'm eating at my dad's, since he's a big fan of wine and quite the connoisseur, with cases and cases of good stuff stored in his house.  He runs wine tasting events and such, and can tell you the type and vineyard by a taste, all that sort of movie snob stuff.  He's not a snob about it, but you know what I mean.

As for alcohol, I've never chosen to develop a taste for beer.  I had it a few times when I was a teen, as everyone underage does, and it wasn't horrible, but it didn't do much for me.  Neither of my parents have ever been into beer very much, and I wasn't one of those guys who determine that anything they aren't "supposed to" do is therefore super cool and must be done.  So I never had some burning desire to drink alcohol just because I was not legally allowed to have it.  And in the years since I've been past 21 and could buy it, I just have never bothered to get into it.

Pretty much the only time I can ever remember drinking beer and enjoying it was when I had half a pitcher of Bud Light with my Granddad when I was about 16, in a pizza place.  Not sure why it was good then, probably since Bud Light is only just barely beer, and it didn't have any real kick or bitterness.  Ironically, my granddad has had problems with alcoholism his entire adult life, problems with greatly contributed to the major issues he had when Granny died, as I described a few days ago.

I've had wine a few times and did shots once or twice with some friends when I was in my early 20's, but I've never much enjoyed drinking.  It's okay for a cup or two, but it costs way too much and I never enjoyed getting a buzz on.  I just got drowsy and bored from it.

Malaya wasn't much different than me; she likes some types of wine but doesn't have them often, and has never been a fan of beer, and only does shots or other hard liquor on social occasions. Plus one of her ex BFs was a big time drunk and for that reason she's quite happy that I'm not one.  Especially for beer, that loser's drink of loser drinks.

Despite our non-drinking history, we've been talking for a while about getting hammered one night, just to see what it's like.  Both times previously in my life that I drank a lot I got really dizzy and sleepy and had to puke, and felt totally fine afterwards.  Like not drunk at all, once I got it out of me.  So I'm not sure I ever really was drunk, since maybe I horked it up before it got to that stage.  Oh I'm sure I was legally drunk, .08 easily, but since I wasn't anywhere near an automobile, that's no problem.

So after weeks of "we should get drunk some time" we finally did, a couple of days ago.  She had half a bottle of Goldschlager left from years ago.  It's pretty tasty, 97% proof cinnamon schnapps, with real gold flakes floating around inside.  Not that you taste them or get any benefit from them, but it's sort of a cute look and a clever marketing device. There was enough for about four shots each of that stuff, and after that we wanted to have some wine, but she realized that she didn't have a corkscrew or any other such device to open a wine bottle with, short of just destroying the cork.  Which we didn't want to do, so we went for a bottle of home-grown coconut vodka that she'd brought back from the Philippines some months ago.  No idea what proof it was, but it was strong stuff.

There was a funny scene in the kitchen when we opened it up, since Malaya had had some in the past from a different batch, and hadn't yet tried this one. She was apprehensive about drinking any, since the past batch was of the "rocket fuel" style, so she said if I could do a shot without coughing, she'd follow my lead.  And when I knocked it down without a tear, she had to put up or shut up.  And of course she did.

The occasion for the drinking was a game of Scrabble.  I like the game and play occasionally, and Malaya likes it a lot.  So we started playing while doing shots, and the rule was any word under 5 tiles meant we both had to take a shot.  We obviously weren't going for a competition or drink off, it was just a way for us both to have some fun and get drunk together.  And drunk we got.

I'd estimate that we did 4 shots of Goldschlager and then 6-8 of the coconut vodka.  Each.

The funny part is that our Scrabble playing continued fine, though we got a bit giggle after a while.  We both scored around 270, with her beating me mostly due to scoring a fat Scrabble off of "juniors", which netted her like 90 points on the word. I slowly caught up after that, but she stayed just ahead to the finish.

We played another game of Scrabble last night, alcohol-free, and scored nearly the same, with her beating me by just a fraction again, after again having one huge scoring word ("square" with the Q on a double letter and the whole thing on triple word.  It was 76 points I believe.) early on, after which she was up by like 60.  I slowly caught up and took the lead by a couple of points in the low 200's twice, but she got the last 4 tiles and was able to beat me in a see saw conclusion.

Not that we're really worried about winning that much; we'll both take a longer word that opens up the board rather than adding an "s" or something cheesy to just get like 40 quick points.  So it's mostly for fun, but we both want to win at the same time.

Anyway, we didn't take a shot every single time someone got a 4 tile word, but we did quite a few times.  And we find it funny that our scores were almost the same when we were playing that schnockered, compared to totally straight.  The one consideration is that since we started drinking after we were already playing, we weren't really fucked up until near the end.  I was keeping score and writing down the words and the scores, and I'm not at all sure some of the math isn't way off.  The handwriting certainly is; about double normal size and very crooked.

Once we finished (the game, not the coconut vodka, or we'd be dead) it was off to bed for something resembling sex, mostly since we were just curious to see if I was indeed, as the famous song lyrics say, "too drunk, too drunk, too drunk, too drunk to fuck".  I wasn't, just too drunk to do it well. Let's just say that she got more out of it than I did. *cough*

There was a funny stagger into the bedroom before that, and I remember clinging to the door frame of the bathroom with all my strength while I used my other hand to brush my teeth, and the walls moved around.  Once in bed there was a long conversation about weird things that I don't really remember at all and Malaya remembers clearly, or so she's told me since.  Neither of us puked though, and neither of us had any sort of hangover the next morning, even.

We'll try it again sometime, possibly even tonight since we have this godawful anime to watch.  We got through the first 15 minutes of it yesterday, but only by spending most of the time snarking on the stupidity of it.  It's called Urotsukidoji II: Legend of the Demon Womb, and it's Hentai, I.E. adult anime, but not for any sort of intelligent reason, I can assure you. It's just cheesy comic book stuff, not much better than DragonballZ type glorified Super Mario Bros type foolishness.  It's just got a lot of nude females being raped (slightly off screen) by weird demonic tentacle type things.  Or so I gather, we've only watched a short bit of it.

We're planning on watching more of it and doing shots though, turning it into a drinking game.  What exactly we'll drink during is hard to say though.  Malaya suggested every time there are boobies shown, but we soon realized we'd need more bottles of alcohol to even get through the first half of the film.  Then we thought we'd take a drink every time someone was murdered or perhaps every there was some laughably-awful dialogue, but but that would have killed us also.

However we clearly need to be at least half in the bag to sit through the damn thing, so we'll have to think of something.  And start well ahead of time; the movie cut from an opening scene with crazy Nazi mad-scientists and enormous demon-summoning rape machines (with about 20 frauleins clamped into the device and mechanized dildos servicing them) to a flying Necromancer type guy sacrificing a young girl to an invisible demon rape monster to some Pokemon-looking guy flying around on top of dozens of little gray smurf monkey things.

And no, I wasn't drinking when I saw it, or wrote the previous sentence.

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