mychai's Diaryland Diary

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JP, The Green Fairy

Hello, my little chirren.

Nothing major to report today. I slept in until around 2:00 because...

Oo! Strike that! Something really neat to report today! I went shopping in Kaiserslautern yesterday with Brookey-Brooke. We went into this dark, humid liquor store to see what kinds of wine they had.

The door opened, ringing a bell, and the rickety old store owner came out of a back room where she (he? it?) had incense burning. She had a hunched back and talked a bit like a German Igor.

She looked into my eyes without saying a word and said in German, "A writer!"

She raised one rickety old finger -- the point a long, brown fingernal -- and went back into her room. A second later, she came out with a bottle, handed it to me, and kicked me out of her store. In the sunlight, I looked down and saw what I had been given.

Ok. So, I am being a little overdramatic here. But it doesn't sound as interesting when I said I went to a store and found a whole cache of Absinth. Yes, Absinth, the Green Fairy. The fuel of many of the best Modernist artists.

So, Brookey-Brooke and I rushed home because I was supposed to have a date. She called and cancelled an hour before, so I ran up to Brooke's place with the absinth and a box of sugar cubes.

I drank the first one. We put about two or three shots-full into a glass, poured some over the sugar cube, and lit the sugar on fire. It made a pretty blue color, and the sugar caramelized quite well. When the fire was out, I stirred it into the emerald-green liquor and added enough water to top off the glass.

We cheered to good writing, and down it went.

The first feeling was an incredibly numb mouth. I couldn't feel a thing. But my saliva glands went on overdrive, so I ran out to spit. Brooke thought I was puking.

"Mwa wa mmmm bbab ba ba" I said. She understood.

Brooke did the second shot, though hers was more shot-sized than mine. Mine was a small glass-full.

My first reactions to it were normal buzziness, like you would have after drinking a couple of good-sized margaritas. But after a while, I started feeling numb all over, kind of like how my mouth felt when I first drank it down.

I felt all floaty. Looking back, everything seemed really hazy. The numbness was the most apparant reaction. It wasn't the same numbness you get when you get drunk. It couldn't have been, since I just had one small glass. This numbness was like I drank down a glassful of morphine. Colors were really bright, and I just felt good.

I walked around and let a number of people try it out because I wanted to see if everyone else had the same reaction as me. I asked today, and all of them stated they each felt numb and floaty.

I woke up at around 1:30am experiencing another effect of the toxic wormwood. I had the most impressively throbbing, painful head. It hurt so bad on the left-front quadrant that it literally burned. I drank a liter of water, which didn't help. I finally took a huge Motrin they gave me at the doctor's office a couple of months ago.

It was 5:30am before I could go back to sleep, swearing I would never drink it again if I could just go to sleep.

But now I want to try it again. But I'll wait until I don't work the next day.

Yeah. I'm working three days on, two days off. It's a terrible schedule, I know.

But before you start thinking the Air Force is wasting your tax dollars by paying me when I only work three-day weeks, keep in mind that, out of seven days, I still work five of them.

I just work in shorter spurts than you do. It is still nice, though.

Ok. That's the news of today. I work tomorrow, so I may have an interesting weather story to tell you.

Don't hold your breath.

11:20 p.m. - Tues., July 20, 2004

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