Today is national get your blood drawn to check on your liver if you are on TB meds that you started taking in the beginning of June. It’s a smaller celebration for a relatively insignificant portion of the population, but I am going to be celebrating like the blood letting barber of Seville because it means only eight months of forced sobriety remain on my cooler door. At twenty seven days we are nearly a month done.

In March 2006 I will be having an off the wagon party in which I will be a very cheap date. My first, and possibly my last, gin and tonic will be made with equal parts gin and tonic. The gin will either be Boodles or Bombay Sapphire. There will be a large lime wedge and the tonic will come from a fresh bottle of Schweppes, which will have been opened and closed rapidly five times to ensure that the tonic is not too fizzy. There will either be four large ice cubes or six medium sized cubes to chill the beverage during its brief life in one of my faux crystal rocks glasses.

I will purr like a kitten as the crack cocaine of the eighteen nineties slides over my tongue, down my throat, and into my gullet and blood stream. The quinine in the tonic will protect me from malaria while the carbonation will speed the delivery of alcohol throughout the system. Once the dastardly blood/brain barrier is breached my neurons will begin overproducing the nerotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA for short) which will inhibit mental activity. I will stop taking you seriously and then you will stop taking me seriously and then all will be right with the world, seriously.

My Cerebellum will begin to feel antebellum and its balancing function in the hind brain will become more like lounging on the back porch anticipating the rebirth of the southern novel. By the second, third or many gins (counting using the Venezuelan Yanomamo Indian numerical system, which has three numbers: one, two and many) I may be listing like the battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein may be on hand to film my reenactment of this cinematic and historical milestone). Have no doubt that the mad Scotsman will be riding me at that point like a Haitian Loa.