DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (20)
By:
June 14, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
In my family there were two sets of parents. There were the interesting people we called Mom and Dad, whose lives were expansive and unpredictable and who we were always chasing after, and then there were the ur-parents: our maternal grandparents, Frank and Betty Herlihy, who we traveled to the Midwest to see at least once a year. They were unchanging and stationary. When we weren’t with them, it was possible to imagine what they were doing at any point in the day: when they were sitting down to dinner, how the table was set, approximately what they were eating, and what they were drinking. Martinis before dinner, and after dinner it was either watered-down scotch in tall glass tumblers or beer in special beer glasses that were exactly large enough for the contents of a can of Hamm’s with an inch and a half of foam. In the freezer, always, was a row of round stemless martini glasses, frosting up for the next afternoon. In the door of the fridge was a semi-bald lemon and a jar of green olives. In the upper drawer next to the sink was a peeler with which to make curls of zest and a tool we called the olive grabber. You depressed the plunger and three wire claws came out the other end. Goodnight, moon.
My grandparents were convivial drinkers, and so were my aunt and uncle and their friends. Weekend gatherings on the screen porch of Frank and Betty’s Michigan cottage were loud, but real arguments with actual hard feelings were rare. “Cheerful” was a word my grandfather used to describe the state of inebriation. Other words were “blotto” and “schnockered.” We children, in our bunk beds, fell asleep to the sound of this steadily increasing cheer.
What I mean to say is that I was a drinker from earliest memory. Long before I had my first taste of alcohol (ironically, a sip of paternal Passover Manischewitz), this part of my identity was fixed. The actual alcohol-consuming part of my life lasted about four decades. I confess that I don’t see how I could have made the friends I made, had the adventures I had — how I could have been the young person I was — without booze. Admittedly, there were people around me having all the fun with half the booze or less, but this is not an AA meeting, and I am not “qualifying,” to use an AA term of art. It doesn’t matter for present purposes why I quit drinking, or why it took me so long. It doesn’t even matter how hard it was, or wasn’t, for me to quit.
I am a convert to sobriety. Maybe not drinking wouldn’t have worked so brilliantly for me when my grandparents were still alive, before my friends scattered, before life sanded off several layers of emotional skin, but man oh man am I glad I quit drinking before Covid, to say nothing of right now. If I still drank right now, I couldn’t tell you about it, because I would be in an alcoholic coma.
DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | Mandy Keifetz on FAITH | Heather Quinlan on THE GRATEFUL DEAD | Carlo Rotella on SMOOTHER GROOVES | Art Wallace on MICHIGAN | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on TAYLOR SWIFT | Josh Glenn on ART | James Scott Maloy on BE-BOP DELUXE | Jake Zucker on LIGHT SLEEPER | Gabriela Pedranti on THE BIG BANG THEORY | Adam McGovern on DOGS | Tana Sirois on COLLABORATIVE EVOLUTION | Rani Som on LED ZEP | Holly Interlandi on HOT SAUCE | Jeff Lewonczyk on TWIN PEAKS | Nikhil Singh on PRE-TEEN DAVID LYNCH PROBLEMS | Christopher Rashee Stevenson on O’NEILL & THE SEA | Fran Pado on SHARKS | Juan Recondo on BEN GRIMM’S INNER LIFE | Miranda Mellis on KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD | Mimi Lipson on SOBRIETY | William Nericcio on ELYSIUM | Crockett Doob on SLEATER-KINNEY | Marlon Stern Lopez on PAT THE BUNNY | Crystal Durant on SEX AND THE CITY | Wendy Chin-Tanner on MY PARENTS’ ART STORE.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!