Salvatore Calabrese is quite possibly the best bartender in the world. Years ago, my wife gave me his slim, elegant little book Classic Cocktails. It sits quietly on the side of the bar as a reference, but it’s more than that. It’s a book about values, about living well.

For example, although it’s essentially a book of cocktail recipes in alphabetical order, it begins with 14 pages on the Martini: history, legend, lore. Then it proceeds to list the others, under the chapter heading “The Rest.” At no point does Salvatore (I feel we’re on a first name basis, and I’m sure he would agree) specifically say that the Martini the best of all mixed drinks — he just assumes it, and demonstrates it.

Calm assertion, as the great dog trainer Cesar Millan would put it. Brilliant.

“To be a bartender is to practice the art of conviviality and humanity to all types of people at all social levels,” he begins. He even writes like the perfect bartender: laying out the ingredients, mixing in a little context and background, giving great advice — but offhandedly, swiftly. He lets you in on things with a conspirator’s wink; reading him, you feel kind of brilliant yourself.

So in that spirit of conviviality, let me kick off your holidays with Salvatore’s recipe for egg nog. We’re not talking about the stuff you get in a cardboard quart at the supermarket. This is a cocktail; it’s meant to be created one drink at a time, made with some flair and served with love. Try it and see.

By the way, these are Salvatore’s exact words; I have added nothing.

1 fresh egg (preferably free range)
1 dash of gomme syrup
1 oz. brandy
1 oz. dark rum
5 oz. milk
nutmeg

Put all ingredients (except the milk) in a shaker and shake sharply. Strain into a highball glass. Add the milk and stir, then sprinkle fresh grated nutmeg.

The holidays can have a dead, depressed feeling about them. Maybe the problem is simply the canned, prepackaged quality of the “joy” that’s being offered. When “JOY!” becomes a banner hanging over the ornament section of K-Mart, maybe it is time for a war on Christmas… at least on that kind of joyless corporate Christmas.

Maybe a little handcrafted, thoughtfully made and offered, and yes, quite possibly alcoholic joy would be the antidote.

Cheers!

With the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination looming, there will be the usual spate of documentaries and articles… many of them revisiting the various theories about what really happened on that morning in Dallas. I watched a bit of one the other night, and at one point the semi-sleazy “investigator” was poking around Dealey Plaza, eventually looking out the window of the book depository next to the one Oswald fired from. And he said, in a tone that came close to suggesting thoughtfulness, “this is a really difficult place to make a shot from.”

Which, pardon me, is utter bullshit.

I’ve been to Dealey Plaza, looked out that same window. It’s a ridiculously easy place to take a shot from. Elm Street slopes gently downward and away from the window, and a car moving at 10 mph would likely seem to stay suspended there for an eternity. It’s all very compact and surprisingly tiny, and you can easily imagine how simple it would be, in the torpor of 1963 Dallas, for a nobody like Oswald to bring a rifle upstairs, open a window, and fire it a few times.

When you assume Oswald acted alone, it’s all very simple and everything falls into place. But when you start picking away at details like how a human head reacts when it’s shot from behind, or the fuzzy implications of 50-year-old acoustics captured on a radio, you quickly fall down a rabbit hole in which anything might have happened. Several shooters? The Dallas police in on the whole thing? The hit ordered by Lyndon Johnson… or Fidel Castro… or the Mafia?  Or, hell, all of them? The more shadowy it gets, the more you get to project your own stuff onto the event, until it’s not about Kennedy anymore. It’s all about you.

Meanwhile, many of the people who are into endlessly poring over this event are lying to themselves about what they’re really up to. Which is having a convenient excuse to indulge a prurient fascination with watching a handsome young President’s head blow apart, over and over and over. And, often, an excuse to neglect their own issues, their own relationships and responsibilities that need tending to while they zoom in on blurry photographs and ponder, endlessly.

So yeah, I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. Do people conspire and collude, and lie? Of course. Just look at tobacco companies, to take a convenient example. But I don’t believe that the President has special superhuman powers, or that the government has secret, shadowy knowledge and intentions. Who is “the government,” anyway? It’s a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats who are anxious, above all else, to hang on to their jobs. Have you ever been in a government office? Been to the DMV? Seen the ancient computers, felt the dead atmosphere of sloth and anxiety, cynicism and indifference? Do you think those people are capable of mounting a conspiracy? They can’t even take a decent driver’s license photo.

For that matter, I don’t believe in UFOs, alien abductions, faked moon landings, 9/11 “trutherism” or any of that nonsense. To me, it’s not just bullshit but an expression of deep powerlessness… an adult version of a child’s perception that Daddy and Mommy know everything, and are doing strange unknowable things in the other room that end up controlling and thwarting us. “They” know the Truth, but they aren’t telling us.

Here’s the thing: when you grow up, you realize that Daddy and Mommy are human beings, limited and flawed and doing what they can just to make it through another day. And screwing you up with only the best intentions. Or perhaps just telling themselves they have the best intentions. I don’t believe in conspiracies, but I believe in accidents and messes and fuckups. I believe in stupidity and selfishness and ineptitude. Callousness and willful blindness and plain old mistakes. Oh, yes, I do believe in those.

And as endemic as they are, who needs a conspiracy?

Photo from arstechnica

“Not to know one’s true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sickeningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryptofacist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.”

— Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods

“There is no difficulty enough love will not conquer. There is no disease enough love will not heal. No door enough love will not open. No gulf enough love will not bridge. No wall enough love will not throw down. And no sin enough love will not redeem. It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble. How hopeless the outlook. How muddled the tangle. How great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. And if you could love enough, you would be the happiest and most powerful person in the world.”

“Radical problems call for radical solutions. Conventional politicians are too softheaded to create radical solutions and too fainthearted to implement them if they could, whereas political revolutionaries, no matter how well meaning, ultimately offer only bloodshed followed by another round of repression.

To truly alter conditions, we must alter ourselves — philosophically, psychologically, and perhaps biologically. The first step in these alterations will consist mainly of cutting away the veils in order that we might see ourselves for that transgalactic Other that we really are and always have been.

The flying saucer is warming up its linguistic engines. The mushroom is shoving its broadcasting transmitter through the forest door. Time for the monkeys to move into hyperspace! It’s going to be a weird, wild trip, but guided by the archaic, Gaia-driven gyroscope, we can commence the journey in a state of excitement and hope.”

— Tom Robbins, introduction to The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna

Yesterday, two friends told me about dreams they’d just had about me, dreams that disturbed them a little bit.

The first was set in an office. I was brusque with my friend in the waiting room, it seems, and then I went into my office and was shouting abuse at him through the door. Then I came out and threw a boxcutter at him, like it was a ninja throwing star. It hit him in the chest and lodged there. Yikes. Guess this is what happens when you don’t have an appointment, Dude.

In the second dream, I was in a hotel with my other friend. I was boiling with agitation and drove him away, fast and furious, to show him a house I said I’d been building my whole life. This was a big one-story magnificent glass house, very zen-like and empty of furniture. Once I was there, I was very happy and confident and I adamantly refused to go back to the hotel. My friend wanted to go back and I told him I wouldn’t take him there, and to go get a cab. I laughed at his description of me: “relaxed and peaceful but with a dose of Clint Eastwood.”

So what can we learn here, aside from the obvious fact that two of my closest friends see me as a bit of a dick?

Or is that the lesson?

My wife, who’s a therapist, has told me that in dreams, all the characters are us. Or some aspect of us. Maybe that lets me off the hook, yet I can’t escape feeling a little guilty. It’s strange when somebody tells you, with great intensity, how you acted in their dream. They recount it as if you’d really done it, and it’s like being told you did or said something when you were drunk.

Is there a Dream Eddie? Does he go out when I’m asleep and commit these and perhaps other, possibly much worse, acts?

Or is there some sort of Energetic Eddie? Just as there might be choppy waves in the water after I’ve jumped into the pool, do the things I say and do have an afterlife that impacts others?

Now we’re getting warmer.

Because I have been noticing this lately: how strong our impact can be. How much we can affect other people, and not just by our words and actions, but by our thoughts. You can sit there in judgment and anger at another person, not even expressing it, and they can feel it. The same goes for loving and supportive thoughts. “Thoughts become things,” they say in The Secret, and that’s true, but it’s also true that thoughts ARE things. A thought has power, and a thought with emotion attached to it even more so.

For a long time, I did not believe this, or more accurately, I knew it somewhere but lied to myself about it, because I didn’t want to own it. I told myself that if I thought something but didn’t express it, it didn’t count.

Not true. We’re all fields of energy, and the vibrations that come off us are radiating out into the world and affecting things all the time. I can see it in my dog, for example, who responds like a tuning fork to whatever mood I’m in. I can see it in my co-workers, the movement toward or away from me depending on my own responses.

The reason I didn’t want to own this is that it’s a huge responsibility. Bad enough to have to own your words and deeds, but to have to own your vibrations? Scary.

But better to be aware of your impact, to take responsibility for it and direct it consciously, than to ignore it and give your friends nightmares.