houston ok because someone is pressuring me to write about it, i'm going to cave in. coz i rarely get requests. mwahahaha.

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both - you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. - Ray Bradbury


izumi sake
Originally uploaded by ulanmaya.
sake flight at izumi. two down, two more to go. oh la la.

placido pinot grigio 2002
150 centiliters
three friends
11 p.m.
december
houston, texas
cold without a light sweater

a bowl of wine corks rests on the bar of my friend's apartment near houston's chinatown. she said she drank all of that by herself. she hadn't moved to houston for six months at the time of our visit. back in poland, she said, her friends drank more.

piling into a minivan to one of houston's worst clubs that happens to be in a great location.

saying no to the driver, the most put-together, sober man in the party, one who drank but still actually walked in a straight line. in front of everybody, after i'd regained soberness, he asked if i wanted a drink. it was something you ask a girl overprotected by friends but who still hung around the apartment bar watching them all drink while she sipped sprite. ahaha. it was a sweet gesture. i'm glad he asked.

You Are a Bloody Mary

You're a fairly serious drinker, who's experimented a lot with different drinks. You're a drunk, but a stable drunk. You don't ever let your drinking get out of control.

i don't really drink, but i like tasting new things. it took a trip to houston, a city where i have three different sets of friends and an uncle with a family, for me to just go ahead and do it.

everybody in that apartment was either a programmer, engineer or a web designer for boeing. yes, the boeing. the aeronautics company relocated from seattle to chicago, but decided to have most of its IT business in houston. company HQ is still in chicago. they even have a gift shop in chicago.

since that 2002 party, i'd only experienced one drink that i really liked - a really light and sweet champagne served at a friends' wedding, during the reception toast. sweet and golden and bubbly. best with strawberries. i could drink that all day and be ok.

light and sweet sham-PAG-ney
lemon drops
red headed sluts
chocotini, but only the one mixed at zentra


zentra2
Originally uploaded by ulanmaya_trois.
kuya noy in action

the sake flight at izumi is four different types, one warm, the other bitter, one smooth like green tea ice cream, the other... i didn't taste the other. i couldn't. so they argued amongst themselves about how it has to be consumed. one forgot about her camera. it was my chance - i gulped the second flight all in one go. down it went, savory and sweet, warm and coating my throat. before it hit my tummy, it hit my head. ahh.

whoa. was that the world, twirling sideways a few degrees? someone caught me. "oh, look, look!"

"oh, but a picture!" his girlfriend said.
"i'll just go like this," and tilted the tiny, empty bowl.
"you were just waiting for us to turn away," les said.
and i was.

no one else was stressed enough to drink that night. the sake was good, but i didn't want to be sport.

and i won't trade any drink for coffee. hehe. sorry.

last summer, a chicago cafe owner joined us in a game of questions. she held a cup of nonbubbly clear something in her hand. vodka, she said. straight up. the only way i know how to drink it, she said. she beat the boy sitting to her right at our game of questions everytime. but give that boy a guitar, and he can beat you at any game anytime.

I wanted so much for my purpose to sing like Nabokov and Updike and Joaquin, not knowing that before I could learn to sing, I first had to find a voice.

I found that voice while listening to the stories of a man in Samar who was drinking tuba. ...

This lusty old farmer about fifty years old, face red with drinking tuba since morning was a marvelous story-teller. ... He used sexual metaphors in the dialect that made our stomachs split with laughter - his sensibility certainly was not as refined as Henry James'. But despite the crudeness of his (sexist) language, I laughed and laughed at his stories. I did not need to be sober to tell myself that after reading the great writers of my literary education, I had finally found my supreme story-teller. ...

I wished I could write the way he talked. For years, my idea of literariness was confined to an achievement of craftsmanship the best representative of which was a Palanca prize-winning "written" work of fiction, not a mere rambling story-telling session around a gallon of tuba. But my friend the drunkard story-teller made me realize how wonderful we were as oral story-tellers, as channels of chismis, as natural boaters who deflate our own verbal balloons. Now in my writing, I am trying to recapture that quality of orality, of drunken braggadocio and chismis. I can hear this voice in my ears; it even has a face that goes with it. Now I don't strive anymore for "greatness" in writing, for winning a Palanca, for self-conscious organic unity and coherence that results in workshop polish. I don’t care if I won't be considered a great fiction writer; I am contented with being a mere story-teller.
- Timothy Montes, The Tuba Drinker as Story Teller.
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what i really dislike about drinking is that it's a great way to pass the time. souse your brain in that stuff, and the night goes bye bye, never to return. it's detrimental if you like sunrises, which on saturdays in autumn at a friend's apartment in chicago were always bright but padded, as if covered with lace. i felt completely fine. i purchased coffee and went to class two hours later. but it's absolutely sweet if no one can tell about last night.  ¶ 11/23/2005 07:08:00 PM