Absinthe

I was disappointed to read this recently. It says, basically, that the legendary and still illegal Absinthe is really just a drink, and not really in possession of any of the long-rumored hallucinogenic effects that supposedly inspired any number of famously weird artists to paint and write and chop their fucking ears off.

I’m disappointed because I like my artists to be crazy, miserable bastards beset by tortuous circumstance. Art is given something of a mystique when it’s made by people who hear voices, or claim to be Gods, or ritualistically store their own feces in secret compartments in their basements; you know, crazies. With them, the real drug users and nut obs, it becomes so much more interesting to think of where a painting or a story came from, especially if the alternative is imagining Manet or Edgar Allen Poe as drunks, as the sort of people that would these days be asked politely but sternly to leave the Applebees bar after vomiting blood in their blooming onion. “Yeah, yeah, the cask of amontillado, whatever you say, alky – go dry out at the homeless shelter and stop scaring our customers.”

I tried absinthe once several years ago, giddily hoping a little for artistic inspiration, but mostly just to be really, really fucked up as quickly as possible. I remember sugar, a shot glass, setting something on fire; it’s possible I might have been accidentally involved with small-time arson for all I knew what was going on. A friend had brought it in from out of country, which seemed to me then much more exciting and adventurous then it does now- small-time smuggling! Fucking Han Solo, right?

I remember it tasting like cough medicine (but better), looking exotically, beautifully shock-green, and almost immediately setting a warm bloom ablaze in my chest, and then, a few minutes later, making my hands and feet fall asleep. Someone asked me if I wanted another one, I think, and I’m pretty sure I thought ruefully for a moment of Poe again, shaking his head sadly, when I asked for a watermelon smirnoff instead.