Please Do Not Put Nutritional Information on My Booze

Being alive is hard as hell. Every day is about waking up suffocating with phlegmy breath caught in your throat, crushed cans and ashes underneath the cot you sleep on naked, paralyzed with terror over how you’re gonna con the world out of some money and beer this time around. And it doesn’t end with acquisition—once you get it, you’ve got to use it right, with discretion, and wisdom, or you’re going to end up living in a rotting trailer with no food, liquified insides, and nothing but a $2000 “gaming rig” and a bloated Steam account to keep you warm at night, and your eyes averted from the abyss that is existence. It’s all a big balancing act, man. You wanna know what death is? Death is what happens when you finally get tired of trying to stand up straight on a rickety seesaw, go slack, and let gravity tip you down into the grave.

Anyway.

Liquor makes you fat, man. This is known. You gotta roll with it. Adapt. Eat some almonds and steamed veggies, work out frequently, and fall in love with Diet Coke. Take little breaks occasionally. That’s how you deal with booze bloat—you either pay attention to your body and try to occasionally give a shit, or let it go and get livin’. There’s not really a happy medium to it. Even Bukowski fiddled with his habits to try to keep the weight down, and Thompson, well, he’s the exception that proves the rule. That lanky motherfucker. We probably should’ve studied his metabolism before we crammed his body in a cannon and shot it at a mountain. [1]

As a whole, ignorance is not a virtue, and willful ignorance is dick behavior. But as always, booze is the exception. It inverts rules—all rules. It upends the social mores and rules of thumb that generally dictate how one should behave towards others, behave towards themselves. I don’t drink for my health. I drink to party. No one pins a placard with the calorie count on it to the side of a fucking birthday cake. You don’t need that shit staring at you in the face. It’s like your parents having sex—you’re very aware that it happened at least once, and the act was obviously a very important factor in your existence, but you don’t ever, ever need to think about it. [2]

All this is to say please, please, please don’t put nutrition labels on the liquor. Make it available, but put it online. Because even if I want to know—and honestly, to be real, I fully support nutritional transparency and the promotion of healthy living, and I kind of do want to know—I don’t want to know right away. Give me the option to be ignorant at will. Let the scale inform me in the morning. I’m used to judgment from the scale. I don’t feel like I could suffer judgment from the booze.

Quit putting nutritional facts on booze.

[1] Kidding. The secret was cocaine.
[2] Except for right now. What’s the craziest position you think your parents ever tried? I’m thinking the Butter Churner.