No, it’s not “I need a new drug”, I’m not Huey Lewis & The News. I don’t want a pill or a powder. I want a new alcohol-like substitute.

One that doesn’t cost too much, taste too bad, one that’s yeah, just right. But I DO want it to make me sick if I take too much, penalize me if I over indulge, or do stupid shit.

Alcohol costs too damn much these days. Beer is $10 a sixpack now! Whaaa? The good stuff, the drinkable IPAs, that is. Sure, I can suck down boxed wine, but hell, the stigma and haughtiness of drinking wine — nope. And drinking the tall, dark, transparent, amber, glorious hard-stuff, whiskey, bourbon, scotch… I’ll do it, but damn, a bottle might last a week.

No, I need a new, designer alcohol, created by bio engineers and chemists to be effective, debilitating, short lived, tasty and cheap.

Why?

Because I’m a sacrificial sot.

What does that mean? This is what that means. It means I hereby sacrifice my life working a job I hate, for an industry I despise, eight to ten hours a day all so that the people I love can continue to exist, get educated, and hopefully pursue better lives than me.

“Oh, you hate your job? Well, quit!” WTF! I can’t quit. I have to keep doing what I do in order to pay the thousands of dollars a month bills to keep this tiny family-engine running. If I were to quit, go off into the wild, live my dream life, the three or five or eight people who directly (and indirectly) rely upon my income, my sacrifice, would perish (or at least suffer considerably).

And everyone who says otherwise is utterly full of delusional visions of a nonexistent lifestyle.

So, to endure my servitude (more like slavitude) (which I accept fully) I need temporary nocturnal divestiture of my responsibilities. And I access such a release through the application of a simple chemical compound known as ethanol.

But, for some reason, the stuff has grown expensive and frankly, entangled with too many societal caveats of acceptable behavior. Fuck that. I just want a new alcohol. One that will cut through the sticky pop-culture, inane, seething world and erase, for a time, my worries of said world.

Is that too much to ask?

Apparently.