hell at half strength

there aren’t a lot of liquors i intentionally steer clear of…

…but this is one of em:

and it’s not without reason.

ruth is a lovely girl. she truly is. but before she went traipsing off to the land down under, she worked at sean patrick’s irish pub in san marcos, texas. her first table as a waitress trainee (and college freshman) was me and shane. on her last night there, now as head bartender (and recent college graduate) she walked in to find shane and i sitting at the bar.

coincidence?

she insisted she was gonna “hook us up” and proceeded to interject into our “cycle”, i.e. in between our usual round (an irish car bomb followed by an irish pint) she interjected shots of that cinnamon swill commonly known as…yep…you guessed it…

it tasted good, i suppose, but not so much “in the mix”. on it’s own i’m sure it’s cool, but i’ve never experienced it on it’s own. why? because it mixed with the the smithwick’s, and the jameson, and the bailey’s, made for a toxic mix in my guts. several times, across the next couple hours, all i could taste was cinnamon and all i could feel was cold toilet water splashing my cheeks as i was reminded repeatedly that i had fucked up. “bigly”, as some of my friends you shouldn’t vote like, would say. and as a result, i never have to even look at this shit again. i don’t really go to that section of the liquor store. i’ve switched to purely irish whiskey (much like a restaurant in 1926 we have our own section compared to where everything else is) so i don’t see it there. but then i noticed it…next to the lobster…at my local grocery store.

(for all not from texas, this state is very prudish when it comes to liquor laws. so grocery stores are capped at a certain abv, or “alcohol by volume” percentage to limit them to beer and wine, but not the hard stuff. for that you have to go to a liquor store, and they are really fucking regulated around here.)

so i was shocked when i saw it…but it turns out, all was not what it seems. just like oklahoma strip clubs used to (still do?) have lower potency versions of mike’s hard lemonade and such, now texas grocery and conveience stores have that devil themed (and created) grull known as “fireball”.

fuck that shit.

but i know the real stuff is 33% abv, or “66 proof” (which i’m trusting was purposeful for the whole closeness to “666 proof” they kinda mean between that number and the devil on the label and shit) and that is WAY too strong for the stores. but i grabbed a bottle of it the other day and noticed it was only 16.5% abv, or 33 proof.

so now that makes sense.

i just can’t believe that of all the boozes out there, the one they decide to replicate for the masses happens to be my one “trigger hooch”. what were the odds?