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THE EPILOGUE: LOVE WINS IN THE END!
We all have grim days, grim weeks, grim months or years even. Build yourself the brightest and shiniest bubble but some awful things will make it through. You can say that it builds character and it might, but for me it is that contrast that really matters. When you have been down and out and now you are up and rising it is sweeter. I always tell people if you want to learn about booze you have to drink some bad stuff too. A life of nothing but the top tier is boring and dull. You need to become aware of the mediocre and the dreadfully bad to appreciate just how magical a brilliant bottle is! I grew up eating terrible food for a variety of reasons. My mother didn't use recipes and would wander off from the Kitchen, hoping for the best, I guess. My father only liked five things anyway. We didn't have the money to eat out, so my first experience with anything tasty was during a sleep over. "Mrs. Jacobs, I have to say that this is the best chicken I've ever had in my life! And I mean it is not even close!" I did not even know I loved food until I went to Italy in College. My head practically exploded from the first meal!
The reason that I drink my single barrels instead of the many other bourbons on the shelf is because more love and care went into them, and you can taste it. These are all excellent distilleries that make wonderful products but none of them smell and taste like Rose petals. The quality control goes into making consistency and it works. Pick up a bottle of Wild Turkey, anywhere in the world and it will taste the same. That all makes perfect sense to me. When you select a single barrel, you are choosing from barrels that have already been pre-screened for quality and now you are choosing the best of the best! Each one will have a strong signature and then it is up to you to find the one that folks will enjoy. I have passed on plenty of barrels that were yummy to me, but that I thought might be too far out there for you. It is not that big is bad and small is good. There are tiny distilleries making undrinkable crap right now and others are being built while we speak. You can pour me a glass of Four Roses and I will say thank you very much! But when I went to their gift shop, I snagged a single barrel. When I went to K and L in California I snagged a single barrel. When I was at Liquor Barn in Louisville, I bought their Wathen's pick!
Dekuyper (and Hiram Walker, Mr Boston etc) makes a wide array of terrible liqueurs. They are cheap and folks shrug and put them into cocktails. No love was used in the making of them and in every other box at least one of the bottles leaks. It is factory where they dump chemicals into neutral grain spirits to make "Apple" flavored goobedly gock. One time Dekuyper made an Orange liqueur called 03, where they actually tried and it was pretty good. They stopped making it years ago and people still ask about it. If they stopped making their "Blue Curacao" etc. people would just buy the Mr. Boston and no one would ask me about the Dekuyper or visa versa. If the entire company went under tomorrow it would be fine. If St. George went under I would personally weep! When I started in this business about twenty years ago quality was rare. People would reach up only occasionally for special occasions etc. We were content to drink these love less bottles because we didn't know any better. Then first time you had a margarita that was made with a top shelf orange liqueur some part of your brain woke up. Maybe you thought Linda was the best at making them, but you still got inspired to do better than the ones you were making at home. I would classify that as love. When I cook, I do extra steps because I love cooking and it matters to me, and when you eat my food, you can taste those choices whether they are your favorite or not. I made the dish the way it was originally written the first time but now I'm off to the races.
My friend Piatra makes beautiful jewelry. Her motivation is not to become rich, it is to make memorable pieces that are designed for the person she is making them for. We have traded that in for Walmart etc. You buy the cheap shirt because that is what you can afford and then you wash it four times and it is faded and torn already so you buy another one. My mother owned no less than twenty blenders and all of them were garbage and broke down in less than a year. They were made as quickly and cheaply as possible and it shows. I bought a great blender in 2013 and I used it this morning. Life and history are not straight lines up. We have the science to make the best and the ability to make the worst with great speed and we do both. They could make a phone that worked really well but instead they rush out the next version so you can throw the old one away. There isn't a proud artist standing behind the product, there are hundreds of frustrated engineers shaking their collective heads because they know the power button doesn't work the way it is supposed to and software updates won't fix that.
Hey! I thought you said love wins!? I'm getting there okay? While history is not a straight line we are not cave people anymore. We have houses, and they have air conditioning and running water and Tempur-Pedic beds. I didn't like that Dracula series that came out a few years ago but the scene where Dracula goes into a normal persons house and assumes they are rich because they own so many things was a great point. These improvements came about from folks who worked hard to discover new things. They had the type of brain to visualize new approaches and the opportunity to apply them. They had a love for science and obsessively pursued it, pushing past failures to figure out the solution. Percy Spencer was working with microwaves when he noticed that his candy bar had melted. Light bulb goes off and he invents the microwave!
Now we all know that no matter how genius of an invention it can be used for harm. Split the atom and come up with a way to power the world but it also becomes possible to make a nuclear bomb. Many brilliant minds have contributed to faster and deadlier ways to kill people. So you get the MRI machine and you get drones that can target people. My point is that if you add it all up we all know that Ambulances are better than Tanks. If you love Tanks and one runs over your foot, you will instantly prefer an Ambulance.
There are plenty of folks that want you to feel unsafe and only highlight trouble and doom. You can turn on the news to discover that not only was Chicken Little right, but he really was downplaying the whole thing, the sky is falling and the end is NIGH!! And then tomorrow you can turn the news back on and find two more reasons why we are doomed, and you should not leave your house, except that something in your house is also giving you cancer etc. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Just watching TV and the ad comes on and says you desperately need this drug and probably that one too! Call your doctor, call her right now! Wake her up and demand that you get a prescription for omiosable right now! Go outside and someone is honking at someone else, there is a bee flying right at you, it is hot, it is cold, it is raining! The car honked because the car in front let a person go in front of them. The bee is pollinating the flowers and keeping the planet alive. The sun is giving us all life and the cold cools the grapes down so the wine doesn't become overripe! The water helps things grow and keeps us all alive. We hate the dentist but they are the reason we get to eat steak.
The vast majority of us are decent human beings that bear no ill will to anyone. We are quieter than the damaged hate mongers always yelling and trying to scare us. Fear is an incredible motivator, and love is a lot vaguer. That stranger is scary and might kill you! That stranger plays the piano beautifully and you will be transported to a magical place when you hear them play. It is in our evolution to believe the first and the second one sounds silly even though there are way more piano players than murderers and that's not even counting keytarist! The Stalin's, Hitlers, Pol Pot's, and Putin's stand out because of the enormous destruction they cause. No matter how wonderful your neighbors Coffee Cake is, if your house gets blown up that wins. Thirteen cakes vs one house blown up and you would say "you know store bought would have been okay if I got to keep my house or even just no cake at all." Those disgusting men are remembered now for their villainy they produced nothing of value. The scientist helping come up with means of killing were taken into our space program and got to use their brains for good. The technological boom that blossomed from space travel was incredible and that is what persists.
The bottles you remember are either stored in your brain for their brilliance or for the occasion they were consumed or most likely both. The hundreds or thousands of mediocre bottles are gone from your brain. The dull conversations, the bland meals, and poorly created movies they just vanish. The bullies that traumatized you live on in your brain sadly, but so do the folks that helped you and inspired you! There is no foundation or support structure for hate and ugliness it just feeds itself. You spew it out and it gets on other people and points them in bad directions as well. No one enjoys it and the power is both illusory and temporary. You can scare folks and beat them down but if they can make it to light and safety that's where they will go. Love survives and thrives because it builds and creates. The kindest people you meet have lots of fans who have deeply enjoyed the warmth they felt from these friends. No one is like "Boy I hope I get to have a lunch with Putin!". They will tell you that the folks that love and care are weak and pushovers and I say, WRONG! Rosa Parks said "I will not move" and that is about the bravest act of strength and love I ever heard of. She put herself in personal danger and improved all of our lives. The folks that got off those boats on D-Day charging towards certain doom won the day and changed the world. The helping hand offered might seem so small but it is frequently huge. You walked by thirty people hating the world and life but someone stopped and wished you a good morning with sincerity and the sun came right out. You might think your cool giving someone the finger and pointing with ridicule at people but you're not.
You're actually the worst. You're the bottle of dekuyper that was already open and leaking in the box. You got the other eleven bottles dirty and are a mess. We will wash those other bottles off and toss you in the bin. You could be helping people, you could be lifting people up, you could be putting positive energy out into the world but instead you chose this. Someone messed you up and now instead of dealing with that, you're messing up as many others as you can. I'm truly sorry that your parents were awful or whatever trauma got you to the place. I don't think you want to be like this, I think you would rather make people smile and laugh than cry and shake. I think you are just scared and don't know what to do with that. You might have run off the sweet folks in your life and are now surrounded by other haters and that makes me sad too. The good news is that it is not too late for you. You can turn this thing right around and even though some people might have cut you out of their lives you can be kind to other people. You can't undo anything at all but you can help people now. I can't take back all of the insults I have hurled at people throughout my life but I slowed that wayyyy down. At the end of the day I have now said more kind things than mean ones each day. Is it 27-1? No but I'm still heading in that direction and it all feels much better. The After Rant didn't vanish because things don't upset me. The After Rant got minimized because the things I love, and the people I love are much greater and more important than the things that upset me. Yesterday, a regular that has been shopping here since I started but only comes in here rarely walked in and it made me very happy to see her. She just wanted some vodka but we smiled at each other and she walked out smiling and I was smiling too, and now it is tomorrow and I'm still happy to see that she's doing well. That's what I want to celebrate. The customer that let me try the Glenallachie 21 has a much more profound impact than the one that insults me because they can't buy a bottle of the B word without getting the wine. I can't even remember his face but sipping on that glorious Scotch is going to stay right here with me and the generosity to share that precious juice.
Stop selling yourself short for doing your best! You're not an automaton that you press the be good button on and then let everything bounce off of you while being a floating orb of light. You will lose your temper, you will forget important things, blurt out dumb stuff, over pay for mediocre bottles, lose football games on Hail Mary passes while your safety is taunting fans and your coach is better suited to run a subway sandwich shop in a small town than coach a football team :) It doesn't make you a terrible person and the time you spend beating yourself up is a terrible waste of energy. There will be so MANY opportunities to do better and they will be arriving instantly. Look down at your phone and send a kind message right now. Go ahead I will wait. Wasn't that lovely? Now they got a little boost from you and they will take that with them. We outnumber the forces of hate and we will persevere exactly like that. No matter what anyone tells you, you are important, you are connected to this world, you are capable of brilliance. The works of art that remain with us were made with love remain and still have power. The critics that pooped on them are all dead and their dismissive comments are lost and meaningless. Someone this very day will hear their first Beatles song, view their first Van Gogh painting, and have that one sip of Scotch that unlocks the joy of whisky for them. Those are facts that can't be ruined by haters. Dancing and singing feel great whether you are skilled or not. We don't all have the voice of an Angel the way Melissa Engleman does but we can both listen to her and feel the love and craft she puts into her writing and vocals and get lifted up. Those loud and angry noises are absolutely surrounded by things greater and more important than them. Right behind the loud angry man, and right next to him, and around the corner are thousands of decent people that go to their kids soccer games, and donate to charities etc. They can slow us down, delay us, divert us, make it harder for us, make our day suck, but we will win. I always end with these with Cheers and that's because I mean it. Cheers, good luck to us all, celebrate your victories, share your joy, make the best out of the day.
Cheers
Keith
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