Orwell said, “Who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present controls the past.” With that in mind, I would like to remind you that Big Monkey is love and we have always been at war with Eurasia. Here at the Ministry of Truth we work hard everyday to make sure that you know only the best history, fresh off the press. Some of you may recall that we made this drink last week. This is simply not true. Any reference to this occurrence was malquoted. A quick search of the historical record will reveal that you have misremembered the facts. So, please join me now as we stand and make, for the first time ever, the Switchblade.
It’s not always that complicated. Occasionally, these drinks happen without a lot of thought going into them. Well, not a lot of thought on my part, anyway. Sometimes you stay out too late and just want to crank up some good tunes and make a drink for the pure pleasure of it. That’s what we have here tonight, just enough words to get us to the break and a heck of a drink to boot. So join me now as we stand and make the Rusty Switchblade.
Maya Angelou spoke of “Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.” That’s a pretty good way to go through life. Well, maybe not the part about being unsurprised, that sounds a bit jaded, which I have been trying to avoid, but it happens. I am all for hoping for the best,but too much of a realist to not prepare for setbacks and disappointment. I figure we’ve had enough of those lately. So let’s look forward, toward better days to come. The pendulum swings from unity to division, hopefully it will swing back sooner rather than later and we can once again work toward a world where we focus on what we have in common and not our differences, which are mostly imagined anyway. So, let’s get together and feel alright, as we stand and make, One Love.
You know how things are fun, how you look forward to them, but one day those same things just become daunting and you dread having to actually do them? No? Huh? Just me, then. Ok. Well, I am glad you aren’t afflicted with this crippling fear, but I hope you can expand your imagination enough to relate. You ever have one of those days where you start a conversation, you can’t even finish it? I mean, you’re talking a lot, but you’re not even saying anything. This is one of those days for me. I am tense and nervous and I can’t relax because it is my buddy Jenn’s birthday. That means I need to find a drink that encapsulates what she means to me and then write nice-ish things about her. I have done it for other folks, and it feels like a thing I do now. It just sort of happened organically the first couple times, but now that it is a thing, I get worried about it. Weird, huh? So, it is only natural, that I should extend this courtesy to Jenn, it is the polite thing to do and I hate people when they are not polite. So join me now, as we stand and make a drink that just screams Jenn, the Psycho Killer.
Driving home today, I learned we have passed the grim threshold of 150,000 people dead from this virus. For my local folks, that’s the population of Murfreesboro. Imagine that. No, seriously, take a moment to imagine the entire population of the city just gone. What kind of a hole that leaves in the lives of those who have lost loved ones. Think about it hard and then post some insensitive crap about hoaxes and masks, show us all how much you care about your fellow humans, since this hasn’t touched your life directly. But I didn’t come here today to talk about avoidable deaths or skyrocketing case numbers, I came to talk about leadership. It’s a pretty simple thing, on the surface. To get things done, someone needs to take charge. There are all kinds of ways to do this, but at its core, it is all about getting the job done, or at least it should be. We get confused sometimes and mistake titles for leadership. It happens all the time, there are a lot of people in charge who have never been leaders and who don’t even want to be. B.B. King got it wrong when he sang about “Paying the Cost to Be the Boss”, it takes more than bringing home the bacon for folks to fall in line behind you. Leading is about responsibility. About taking care of people. Making sure that their best interests come first. They may not agree with you, or want to hear your message, but making tough calls to protect your people, especially when it is unpopular, that is the true cost of being the boss. It also means being adaptable and changing as you learn more. Way back in early June, I asked you to join me in a classic Grasshopper Cocktail. It was really lovely and gave me a great opportunity to talk about prejudices and how not recognizing them makes us miss out on the good things in life. I felt pretty good about that and enjoyed the drink. I did the best I could with the information I had at the time. Well, I know more now and since I try to practice what I preach, I’ll ask you to join me once again as we stand and make the Improved Grasshopper 2.0.
One of the cool things about making cocktails from quarantine is having folks reach out with suggestions, requests or just comments, I love to hear how you are enjoying the drinks, or what you are doing to keep sane in this indefinite holding pattern that we call life. This drink is a direct result of my buddy, Matt, suggesting I try Tuaca liqueur. I had never heard of it, but he said it was good, I trust him on these things and I was making a liquor run anyway, so I added a bottle to my curbside pickup and here we are. So, join me as we stand and make, the Honey Wall.
There are all kinds of things in life we judge without thinking about it. It sucks, but we have certain prejudices. It’s not necessarily our fault, we are hard-wired to take shortcuts when it comes to some things. Our brains use a sort of shorthand that almost forces us to extrapolate opinions from past experiences and impress those feelings onto things we haven’t actually experienced or gotten to know. Some times, this is really good. Once you have had an experience with spoiled or rotten food, the mere scent of it tells you to run away. You don’t have to suffer it a second time. Other times it really sucks, when it makes us lazy. When we let our preconceptions or societal norms drive us to make snap judgements, without really considering the individual merits of the case. We do this a lot, making the easy, “I don’t want to think about it calls” about things or way worse, about people. We are born with some of this, we learn most of it, but the important thing is we have to recognize it, and that is hard to do. I ran into this today when I was making a drink and I guess we ought to talk about it. So, join me as we stand and make, The Grasshopper.
We’re gonna do something a little different for Sally’s birthday. A cream based dessert drink. Is it because she’s sweet and creamy and goes well in stemware? No, though those things may well be true. It’s simply for the name, so join me as we stand and make the oddly appellated, Give Me a Dime.
