oh jackie boy, the pipes, the pipes are callin’…

i KNEW i was right on this…

…but sometimes you just need proof, damn it!

i didn’t start drinking till i was twenty-eight (back in 1999) and when i did i didn’t jump in with beer – it was jack daniels. why? ’cause i was doing a showcase with djax records, and their founder thanked me for helping out with a bottle of jack daniels, since there’s no such thing as “djax daniels”. sure, at the TIME i didn’t drink – but could you refuse booze from this?

so for all of you who wondered “why did you finally start drinking?” now ya know. anywho, i held on to the bottle forever (long after it was drained) but finally succumbed to pressure from alex when she lived here to toss all the bottles that had collected on top of the fridge as this was not a college dorm room (side note: when she split she moved in with girls much younger than her, all of whom kept empty liquor bottles on top of the fridge in their apartment). so, i tossed it – but wished i hadn’t. because of THIS memory?

nopers – ’cause of THIS one:

(in case you’re curious, it was a shitload easier to get pics of saskia then this older jd label – see below why i needed an older one)

notice below the word “whiskey” it says “43% Alcohol By Volume (86 Proof)”. the current shit is only forty percent by volume, or eighty proof. shane said it had ALWAYS been that way, and i disagreed. turns out originally it was NINETY proof, but “dulled down” to eighty-six proof in the late fifties / early sixties. it then sat at 86 until 2k4 when some marketing geniuses determined that an 80 proof version would sell better, so they “dulled it down” again. the low octane jack has been all we’ve had for the last six years.

fuck that.

bring back the jack i started with – this eighty proof stuff requires too much consumption for me to get that “special feeling”.