Imagine the modern world without people like Churchill or Hemingway or Poe or Picasso. These people were drinkers, and alcohol to them was inspiration. Indispensable. As teetotallers, these great men and their ilk wouldn't merit a footnote in the textbooks that they fill chapters of.

Drinking to them, and to so many other great achievers throughout all of history, was serious. It was an integral part of their lives, and without it and them, the modern landscapes of politics and art and literature (and other fields) would look very different.

Alcohol is high on the list of things that have made modern life what it is. You might not like modern life, but who can say a dry one would be better? We tried that. Look what happened.

The ablity to alter our state of mind sets us apart from the animals. When you're drinking, you might as well be painting or sculping or writing poetry. You are taking part in a storied tradition that stretches back farther than recorded history.

And so, if you're going to drink alcohol, then drink alcohol. Really drink it. In a form that is respectable and worthy of the name. We live in an alcohol epoch, and every time you drink some twisted, colorful bastard-child of vodka and raspberries, you defeat the purpose. You distance yourself from the meaning. You impugn the indomitable human spirit that drunkenly, stubbornly existed through the ages.

It's like flipping through the pages of a Guttenberg Bible and then throwing it on top of your bookshelf to rot.

And as you're going through the halls of the Louvre, taping up crayon reproductions next to the Rembrandts and Monets, you get offended when you hear things like "frou-frou," and launch into the same whiny, umbrella-garnished defense. You have a childish tantrum about how you don't like the taste. The coconut looks cool.

But that's all you are and that's all it is: a child and a tantrum. You and your juvenile curly-strawed abomination just don't understand. You really class, without blushing, a fuzzy navel with a Scotch rocks. Or a Garfield comic with Water Lilies.

You and that chi-chi are the people who walk marathons.

The real drinking world isn't really angry, just pitying and annoyed. You see, when you play around our feet like that, you always manage spill to pineapple juice everywhere.