41. Don’t Listen to Me Anymore

Unless I say so, okay?

When I was in college, I used to play guitar out on the quad with my shirt off. A lot. I was that guy. If the temperature was over 60 degrees, and there was even a chance of sunshine, I was out there, doing my thing. Most of the time, I was playing an electric bass, unplugged, and you couldn’t really hear what I was playing unless you got up really, really close. Which was, of course, exactly what I wanted.

I went to a small liberal arts school where the vast majority of students were so similar you would have thought they were cut from the same Abercrombie inseam. I prided myself on being different, but not too different. I majored in English and wrote plenty of obnoxiously sexual poems, which I read at every open mic night I could find (I was that guy too), but I fell in line and got a business degree as well, because it seemed like a smart thing to do. For my, like, future.

Ha. The point is, back then, I thought of myself as unique. But what I was saying was far from it.

Look at me. Listen to me. Pay attention to me.

Now, I laugh at that version of myself. But the laugh is laced with a bit of sadness, because, well, I really haven’t changed all that much. I’m still playing guitar on the quad with my shirt off, except now the guitar is my writing, and the quad is the internet. This newsletter is just one more guitar that I’ve sweated all over. I’ve been trying hard to get people to come close and listen to what I have to say, to read whatever stories I can spin into something meaningful, mildly entertaining, and hopefully worth their time. I have of course also been trying hard not to make it look like I’ve been trying hard. As if I was cool with it either way, professionally indifferent to whether people came along for the ride or not. But that’s bullshit. I care a lot.

As I alluded to in last week’s subscriber email, it was important to me to try to grow the number of subscribers here at Ideas Over Drinks. But it has been quite challenging to make that happen. I sometimes wonder if I was trying to put too many things into this 1200-1500 word box, and that maybe all my learnings about storytelling, racial justice, politics, culture, etc. just didn’t mix well with the cocktail recipes. “Don’t inject religion and politics in to a conversation, and keep your personal values and beliefs to yourself until it would be inappropriate to remain aloof,” wrote world-renowned bartender Jim Meehan in his bartending manual in 2017. From a business perspective, it makes sense. But then again, is this the way it has to be? Haven’t business perspectives created a whole lot of mess in our society?

Other times I thought that the box itself wasn’t pretty enough. Meaning, email isn’t nearly as flashy as all the social media platforms, and if I didn’t have a great picture and a killer first paragraph to catch people’s attention from the jump, then they’d stop reading and spend their online “free time” time elsewhere.

Or maybe I just didn’t know how to properly self-promote this newsletter on those very same social media platforms. I didn’t have the time or mental bandwidth to hustle the algorithm into working for me.

I could go on, but I don’t want to turn this into a laundry list of what-ifs and missed opportunities. Because I want this much to be clear—and I suppose I’m saying this to myself just as much as I’m saying it to you: I did some good work here over the past ten months. I celebrated the writing of some excellent authors; this piece on Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko, which also delved into the notion of truth in fiction, was one of my favorites. I broke down some solid cocktail techniques, often fusing them with some history that needed to be reevaluated, such as this issue on the Black bartenders behind the Mint Julep. I shared some humorous—and arguably even insightful—stories about our wonderful and occasionally infuriating kids. And I put myself out there in a big way. This piece on my struggles with anxiety and depression was difficult to write, and yet it also felt painfully necessary, in part because I know that so many other people struggle with these issues too. And that we don’t have to suffer alone.

Now though, I’m tired. I’m tired of putting myself out there. Mental health-wise, I’ve been going through another rough patch lately, and this is a big reason I know I need to take a step back from this project. I suppose I could just keep firing off cocktail recipes, but that alone would be boring, wouldn’t it? Maybe not. But I can’t help but think that good drinks are often accompanied by stories.

Regardless, I’m sure I’ll be back in the future per usual, slinging something or other in your email inbox before too long. I’ve thought about revamping this project as an interview series, to take the focus off me and put it more squarely on other fascinating people (I can only be so fascinating, you know?) but I’ll have to see how this fall goes before I fully commit to that.

We shall see.

Until then, here’s a final drink for the road. It’s what I’m drinking this Friday, as a toast to y’all.

Peace Out

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 oz. Suntory Toki whisky

• 1 oz. raspberry cardamom shrub (recipe follows)

• 3/4 oz. cold brew concentrate

• 2 oz. soda water

• Lemon twist for garnish

Directions

1. Pour everything but the soda water into a chilled highball glass.

2. Add ice, then slowly add the soda water. Aim for the side of the glass so as not to shock the ice and lose carbonation.

3. Slide a barspoon alongside the ice, then slowly lift and stir the ice.

4. Garnish with the lemon twist.

Raspberry Cardamom Shrub

Crack open 5-7 green cardamom pods and muddle the seeds. Toast in a medium saucepan over medium heat for 5 minutes. Add 1 pint of raspberries and 1 cup of water. Simmer on low for 30 minutes. Remove from heat. Add 1 cup of sugar and 1/4 cup of champagne or rice wine vinegar. Stir to combine. When mixture is cool, strain through cheesecloth, twisting the cloth to extract as much juice as possible. Store in the fridge for up to approximately 6 months.

Notes

This is a variation on a Japanese highball, which is a drink I can’t get enough of, especially after having the good fortune to travel in Japan. In the cities there, you can find canned highballs at every 7-11, and in some places, in vending machines on the street. Here, I use the raspberry cardamom shrub to add a sweet-savory element that shifts the drink in what I think is an interesting direction. The small amount of cold brew adds just enough bitterness to balance out the shrub. Big shout-out to Masahiro Urushido and his book The Japanese Art of the Cocktail, which inspired this cocktail. Masa’s recipes and techniques have really helped me step up my highball game, and so much more. I highly recommend checking out his work.

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Okay, friends, cue the Boyz II Men, because we’ve come to the end of the road (yeah, I did). The Ideas Over Drinks website / Substack page will stay up indefinitely, so if you ever want to look back on past issues, you can do so here.

I’ll catch the subscribers one more time next week. To everyone else, I’ll catch you… somewhere? Thank you again for taking part in this project. Hopefully you learned a little something, had a think and a drink or two, and cracked a smile along the way.

Cheers!

J.