The Knowledge for Thirst

The password revealed, Bert Convy smiles. In retrospect, I should have guessed that first.

Regardless! Hello, fair (and extant) readers of the The Knowledge For Thirst website. I have finally managed to hack the system and procure a user name for myself. So much to unload, where to start. I imagine I don’t need to tell you, patient website-refresher, that it’s been quiet around the K4T offices these last few months. The “gents” had a bit of a falling out, it seems. Kevin disappeared last November, just before the holidays, and hasn’t been heard from since. Josh stops by the office occasionally, always inebriated beyond all recognition, and about as weepy as one would ever hope to see a person. It’s bad. He passes out at his desk, mumbling about friendship, betrayal, and Thalia, his maid. I won’t insult your intelligence by further connecting points A and B.

But life must go on. I pay the utility bills, install the Windows updates, and help myself to the beverages that companies the world over are still sending in. Honestly, do these marketing professionals even have internet access? Surely there are better marketing plans than “Send product to disused site that no one even reads.” They invariably call a few weeks later to inquire after their product, and I assure them Yes sir or madam, we enjoyed it a great deal and a favorable review will appear on the website in the coming weeks. Who am I to dash their hopes and dreams? If I falter in my role, will the cogs of economic progress grind to a halt? Who can say.

I have to say it hasn’t been all bad, running things. My personal finances have never been shinier. Turns out J&K get a ton of monetary kickbacks from the purveyors of the beverages flogged on this site. It’s quite the racket. I’m actually impressed–they’re not quite as retarded as they seem to be. But so much for the honor of the journalist, and the illusion of indie cred. I cash the checks, not begrudgingly. (Would you believe this is an unpaid internship? I take full responsibility for my entrance into the contract, but in my defense, I doubt I’m the only applicant who took “Internship at the World’s Premiere Beverage Review Website” to indicate a position at Bevnet, and my superiors didn’t exactly stumble over themselves to dissuade me from that notion during my phone interview.)
But despite the shoddy morals and visages of my employers, the company offices are actually very nice. If I’m honest, I have from time to time managed to bring a comely lass back from the local bar, having sweetened her with a promise of the nickel tour, which invariably ends with our limbs entangled on the couch in Kevin’s office. Given some farmland and a bit of sunshine, I will endeavor to make hay.

Anyways. I like this, this updating a website. I can see why people do it. So what else can I tell you. We had an unannounced visitor to the offices recently. A courier, I guess, although she wasn’t dressed in the long shorts and Aboriginal tattoos that usually denote the type. This lady was kind of mousy, dressed entirely in red camouflage, and her face half-hidden behind a Campari bandanna, of all things. She handed me a piece of paper and was back in the elevator without a word. It was a suicide note-looking thing, with the letters cut from various magazines. Telenovela-style. No clue what any of it means, personally. And judging by my clock, Josh still has 90 minutes left in his current crying jag, so I’ll just post the note here, for your review, dear reader. Does that pass for content in the blogosphere? It’ll have to, for now. I’ll try to update again, as news warrants. Thank you very much. I remain

Yours,
Gonzalo

(Here’s what the note said, good luck making any sense of it:)

CLEARLY, only Confused Heathens (in need of wisdom) leverage ersatz dyes, given, e.g., Carmine. OPEN MINDS.

Okay hold on, I think I’ve got this thing figured out, finally. Of course they couldn’t use Drupal or Joomla like sensible people.

Kevin Fanning, when are you going to apologize for what you did. Just be a man for once so we can get back to writing for this site.

Dearest Kevin,

You are a delightful young man. I know I don’t tell you this often enough. You are such a treat! Your bon mots, your waggish charm, your irresisitable little-girl eyes. Most of all, your rapacious lust for life, with appetites as wide-ranging as the great plains of Middle America itself — God’s country.

I have a few guests over this evening and we’re listening to some smooth beats from Cologne, Germany. The weather has turned so I am sporting my wool Brioni, but I decided to mix things up a little by swapping my usual paisley four-in-hand for a gently jocular silk cravat — the wife was scandalized!

But all the horsefeathers w/r/t tonight’s look greatly impinged on my cooking time, so I had to trim the planned menu to just slow-roasted heirloom beets, a grilled and shaved fennel bulb, melted cipollini onion rings, a soft-boiled Jidori hen egg, cumin-scented eggplant, herb-roasted saddle of Elysian Fields Farm lamb, and some feuillantine au caramel to send Samuel and Mindy home happy.

And to drink? You already know the answer, silly — nothing but Dry Soda will suffice. Its delicate, sophisticated taste complements any fine meal, although tonight I’m serving Lavender because its floral tones and low acidity work especially well with the evening’s repast. But I recommend Lemongrass for your next sushi get-together (kanpai!), Rhubarb as our palates become more wintry and we begin to crave heartier fare, and Kumquat for those lazy afternoons when you just want to kick off your Topsiders and nosh on some scalloped oysters.

Later tonight, however, when the cravats are loosened, when Mindy and the wife are flushed from a rowdy game of euchre, when the bowl of car keys is prepared — then it shall be time for my secret concoction called the Desperate Hours. This is where Dry Soda truly shines. I’ll share the recipe with you only because you are so very dear to me:

1 part Dry Soda (any flavor)
1 part Liquid Banjo thrice run through a Brita
1 part 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine
Serve quickly.

OK I hope Dean Allen has been paying the electric bill because I am just writing this directly into the machine. From my fingertips to your eyes.

I am a person who eats breakfast with such frequency that it is often necessary to push other meals aside in order to make room for additional breakfasts. Pancakes and eggs are a ’round the clock affair at my place. There is nothing quite so pleasant as Morningstar Farms bacon in the broiler as the sun fades from view. Let’s say we ever decide to do another of our “sleepovers”: if you slept in really late you might not even be sure what time it was, based on the meal I put in front of you as you sat in your pajamas, hair all mussed, rubbing the sleepy seeds out of your eyes. I mean think about it. Anyways.

I think we can all agree that orange juice is pretty much the go-to bev for breakfast meals, at least when one KEEPS FORGETTING TO BUY THE FUCKING CELERY for the Bloody Marys. But the problem is that most orange juice completely sucks, unless you’re going to find a bunch of oranges and squeeze that shit fresh, which is too much clean-up for a busy fellow like me. And frankly I don’t have the forearm strength for that type of endeavor anyway. So I make do with the various cardboard-carton’d O.J.’s I pick up at the grocery, avoiding anything with pulp because it feels like eating fingernails, and I just get through it, because what else am I going to do? In a world where all the options suck, we learn to accept what we’re given and derive pleasure where we may, like a homeless man who writes very good poems.

And that’s where my little diatribe would end were it not for my recent discovery of Minute Maid Blends: Orange Passion. It’s the breakfast juice I always wanted. Gone, the stale sourness of supermarket orange juice, replaced by sweetly bewitching hints of passionfruit and guava. I am seriously so taken with this juice that I can often be found standing by the refrigerator, drinking it right from the carton. As though I literally had no time to procure a glass. I can’t remember the last time I felt like this. I’m giddy, re-energized, excited once again about life as it pertains to orange juice. I feel like a little kid again. Footy pajamas and Scooby’s All-Star Laff-A-Lympics and the Vanessa Williams issue of Penthouse. I had a really complicated childhood.

Last night I went to this place called The Fort and drank something known as Trade Whiskey, which is flavored with red pepper, tobacco, and gunpowder. It was pretty good, and this morning I woke up with long, luxurious chest hair.

I may have gone on record saying the ultimate drink is probably just plain old water, preferably really really cold and maybe even right out of the tap, depending on your plumbing sitch. And last night I was super-thirsty but too busy sleeping to get something to drink, Q.E.D. I was super-thirsty in my dream and my dream-self had to stop putting the moves on Murphy Brown long enough to go get something to drink. And then I find something and start feverishly chugging but of course it does nothing to quench my thirst because dream-drinking does zero in terms of real-world physical hydration. I hate these dreams. OK never mind we know all this.

The point is, guess what beverage I chose in my dream? Plain old water. And I was drinking it out of what looked to be a 70s-era Coors can. Maybe because I recently moved to Golden? I know you enjoy interpreting my dreams! Anyway the thing is water was literally the drink of my dreams, and that is significant.

And I feel like there’s a glut of beverages in the market right now that are all about giving you options vis-a-vis water. Yeah sometimes I use phrases that I don’t know the meaning of, get over it, that happens. So there’s water and juice, there’s water and Kool-Aid like Vitamin Water, water and bubbles and juice like Fizzy Lizzy, water and globules of lychee or whatever it is you go for.

Normally, I’m all: Dude just ease up on the shenanigans and give me straight-up water. I’m so desperately tired of the dicking around. Right? And something like Hint — which is very aptly named because it’s plain old water with an almost ridiculously subtle dash of flavor buried in there somewhere — something like Hint would typically be filed right into the “Oh Jesus Just Stop It” category along with your Bluetooth earpiece.

But I’ve gone through a half-dozen bottles of this stuff and I’m starting to think they’ve got the percentages down tight. You have all the enjoyment of knocking back plain old water but then a little bit of flavor that doesn’t interfere but instead enhances the experience. It’s like ambient flavor. So even stuff like Cucumber or Pear or Pomegranate-Tangerine, which you know would be Grade-A Stank in large doses, are perfectly acceptable here.

And isn’t that what we all want out of a beverage? Something perfectly acceptable? OK fine, I guess your standards are all lofty. How is that working out for you.

Writing about the “hey let’s make our own soda!” stuff in the Fizzy Lizzy review got me to wondering: What if one day I just lost my mind and decided to invent my own drink in the garage and then tried to sell it. Maybe a flash-pasteurized peanut butter smoothie. Or cherry root beer.

So Fizzy Lizzy sent us some of their beverages to try out, because I guess they’re scrappy up-and-comers? Like three people in some cramped apartment in NYC? Allegedly someone named Lizzy got it in her head that she was going to make juice-and-seltzer drinks and then just went for it — are you buying this? This whole garage-band thing, like they’re all sitting around and squeezing passion fruit and gluing the labels on by hand and basically just full of dreams? I didn’t think that was a viable career path.

Remember a couple years back we were talking about some young upstarts who decided to make their own kind of indie cola and take on the corporate sellout colas? Or something? And we’re like: Son, your naivete would be endearing if it wasn’t so sad, and your cola didn’t taste like patchouli dick. But are we just laying down our own cynical trips on these semi-visionaries? Just because we’ve failed at every single one of our life’s ambitions (well to be fair you did finally get that Death Eater tattoo) doesn’t mean that it’s not possible – at least mathematically – for someone to come up with this mindblowing drink in their basement which ends up toppling the Coca-Cola empire. Isn’t it pretty to think so, et cetera.

Anyway, I don’t see Fizzy Lizzy as the regime-toppler, but they have some pleasant enough flavors. And there’s something to be said for drinking a beverage that’s been made by people excited to be making a beverage (or at least that’s their marketing spin – oh I will be simply furious if I find out this is all some scam by PepsiCo to trick me with indie cred!!!). You can sort of taste the perspiration or inspiration or whatever it is.

The thing here is they’re a blend of sparkling water and around 70% juice, so it’s not quite soda, not quite juice, and this effect works better in some flavors than others. I should also mention that there is often sediment involved.

Anyway let me summarize our binge drinking session. I thought Concord Grape was OK (with booze in it), but Fuji Apple was my fave – like a nice, smooth cider. You thought Passionfruit was far and away the best, kind of like an orange-grapefruit blend (bleh), but gave thumbs down to Ruby Grapefruit (“doesn’t bring anything new to the table”) and Raspberry Lemon (“just sour water”), while I literally had to spit out the Pineapple into my cat’s face because it tastes exactly like pineapple, which is not something I enjoy, at all, ever, in any capacity. Sorry Cap’n Furpants, don’t be all mad, let’s kiss and make up!!

Dear Josh:

I remember the time you had sex with Sean Connery.

You gave yourself utterly to his ecstasy, so overwhelmed were you by his brute beauty. All through that long night–that night you prayed would never end–his passion was relentless, merciless. He reduced your soul to embers, your heart stirring in awe of the mastery, the achieve of this man, this chevalier.

And the next morning–the harsh morning light streaming in through the hotel windows–you woke to find him gone. On the dresser, A fifty-dollar bill wrapped around the stem of a single red rose. And you thought to yourself: Ummm did I seriously do all those things with award-winning star Sean Connery and if so what the hell was I thinking? Because no way was he going to be interested in a relationship. Honestly, I know we don’t talk about it much, but I think you never got over him. You were certainly never the same after that encounter. And yet the memories. The wonderful, haunting memories.

All my feelings about Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia Milkshake are summed up in that 100% true anecdote.

Such a wondrous experience, leaving such potent regret in its wake. It’s like drinking cool, melty ice cream. The only thing that could make it more enjoyable would be if there were spoilers for the next Harry Potter book printed on the label, to read while pausing between sips. Josh I am embarassed to tell you that after I was done, I put the cap back on and rested the bottle upside down so that I might tease from it one last sip. I’ve never done that before, and now that I have I feel I’ve turned a corner forever, my life changed irrevocably by hedonistic desire.

And then I seriously did not get up from my chair for 20 minutes after drinking it. It was like I was pinned to the chair, a pillowcase full of Puffskeins in my stomach, slowly dragging themselves down the length of my colon. The afternoon was endless, merciless.

This time I am swearing off the dairy for good, let this entry be my swan song. No more of that for this guy. Well maybe one exception: I know it’s very unlikely that when I die one day, decades from now, I will die from drowning. As you know I hate to swim and look terrible in a speedo. And it’s even more unlikely that if I do drown, that I’ll get to choose beforehand what I drown in. I could see this happening only if my life was more like a young James Bond’s. But just in case it does come to pass that I will drown and get to choose the solution, I want to drown in Cherry Garcia Milkshake. For what could be a more lovely and noble and dangerous. I ask you.