To Taste What the Rat Made
Many of my friends went one of two ways in 2020 when we all stayed inside. They stopped drinking, or they drank more than they ever had before. I learned to mix cocktails during the pandemic.
No one really teaches you how to mix a drink. There’s books you can read, ideas that can inspire you, but you can’t put it in an oven at 325 for 18 minutes until it reaches an internal temperature of 145. To really do it right, it’s a collaboration with memory, expectant faces in front of you, remembered faces behind, and bold flavors you can still taste with haze around the edges. The best cocktails are stories you get to sip.
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If you had asked me last Monday, I would have said that the best Pixar film is WALL-E.
It’s a controversial pick, I sense your brow furrow from here. If you had pressed me, as many have, I would have said that the film enables access to a delicate, higher truth that we must cherish (as we should a boot-germinated sprout that reveals a bright shared future, much as many would wish that it hadn’t been found in the first place).
We are on a path to ruin. Life is precious and delicate. Won’t someone stop it before it is too late.
And to imagine a world where we’ve gone over the edge – where our pale blue dot has suffered a slow death due to recursively rewarded self-interest – and believe we can still find a way back to earth and soil and life. What a restorative image. It is medicine for an anxious mind like mine.
I used to screen it every summer to middle-schoolers who had days before concluded intense affirmative-negative debates pitting fossil fuels against unproven green technology. It was a conclusion of weeks of research on both sides, and most of the class had argued both positions at one point or another. It wasn’t long ago, right around the time it became difficult to use the presidency as validation that the ability to express oneself with clarity was respected and necessary.
I can’t say I still have the optimism that feels necessary for WALL-E to land as it once did for me, though I still think it is an exceptional articulation of people and what machines could be one day. I need something closer.
Today, I realized the best Pixar film is Ratatouille. A latent suspicion of mine.
What once resonated most with me in Ratatouille was Remy’s struggle of identity. To set out on one’s own accord, against all odds following a passion that felt at odds with expectation, even possibility. An individual, from anywhere, can mine a rich vein and catapult themselves to relevance and acclaim and an apartment that overlooks the Seine.
There’s more to it that I’d love to get into, but can’t shake the burden of the god damn fucking memes.
Nobody I’ve met has puppet raccoons on their head, we’re not subject to tyrannous rodents that govern our anxious minds. That trendy gelato with a strawberry in it probably isn’t fireworks welcoming your culinary awakening.
I feel like Ratatouille has entered a collective distortive memory. Maybe a little like the daiquiri: rum, lime, and sugar muddled – not strawberry syrup and ice and ninja blenders. A stiff drink is memory and experience.
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To make anything great, we must deeply understand the work that has come before. A negroni is gin, campari, and sweet vermouth – and it has been since 1919. Bold, sexy innovations fade to be classics eventually. Give it a twist, substitute campari for aperol you devil. The twist only draws breath if you know what you’re remixing, if you’ve tasted the original enough times that the substitution isn’t a guess but your point of view grounded in some other experience that – if all goes perfectly right – you might just impart with a sip.
Every creative decision anyone has ever made is a rat under our hats. What mixes our pigments? Whose voice chides us when we serve something that isn’t quite right?
No artistic endeavor – doubly so for any scientific advancement – was made alone by an individual. Where we arrive after consensus and collaboration is the very best of us: a synthesis, uncompromised, with hope of where we might get to if it all comes together.
Every time I mix a drink, I ask my friend what they want. I remember what I’ve made before, what I have to hand, and what I think they might like based on what they say. Then something else takes over.