Make the Perfect Holiday Cocktail
Mountain Dew and Crystal Palace (“CREE-stay paLACHay”) vodka, splash of grenadine.
The perfect cocktail: five parts Mountain Dew, one part Crystal Palace vodka.
If you need a third ingredient (traditionally, a cocktail must have at least three), add a dash of grenadine.
Mix that for your guests this Christmas season. It has everything a cocktail requires, plus it's green and red! It also adds energy to your holiday gathering and it's cheap.
Perfect.
So insists the left hemisphere.
I love cocktails.
But I don't "get" cocktails.
You can wreck a gin and tonic simply by putting it together in the wrong order. The proper process is to ice first, add a shot of gin, pour in tonic, and garnish with lime. Do it in reverse, and the drink suffers.
That intuitively makes no sense,1 but my bartenders and liver testify that it's true.
The left-hemisphere objects. It says that if something does not make sense, it can be dismissed, ignored, and even ridiculed.
All because our (oh so mighty) rational faculty doesn't get it.
That's the modern mindset, wrapped in the modernist philosophy launched by Descartes and his insane ideas.
Don't be like that.
If your body tells you something, listen to it, even though your rational faculty might not understand.
The same goes for a host of things we don't understand.
Manners, for instance. Why doesn't a man wear his hat indoors? It has never made sense to me, but I don't do it. Even as a cocky young man, I found it calming to remove my hat and defer to the benign force that told me it was the right thing to do.
Another example: tradition. Many things have built up over the generations that we don't understand, and that's part of the fun of adhering to them: it gives our left hemispheres the middle finger.
Let's face it: The left hemisphere is a brutal master. It has usurped the right hemisphere's rightful role and, like most usurpers, is a bastard. Among a host of other sins, it insists we spurn good things just because our rationality doesn't understand them.
And then insists we do bad things when our rationality says we should (this is the heart(lessness) of Machiavellianism).
That's why college students rationalize that it's acceptable to serve their guests Mountain Dew and low-shelf vodka.
Even though it violates good manners, tradition, and taste.
But chemistry explains why it does make sense: alcohol is lighter than tonic water, so by adding it first, it filters up. If you add it last, it doesn’t filter down. The blending, crucial to a cocktail, then suffers.